Extraction
by Arcsaber
Summary: The end of Season 3, or at least my take on it. Possibly OOC, but I hope not. EPILOGUE UP - now complete.
1. Hardware

The laboratory's door had hardly begun to swing shut when Broyles was assailed by Peter's insistent voice.

"Did you get it?"

He asked without looking up from his soldering, but sensed Brandon's attention wander to the large black suitcase in Broyles' hand and his face slacken in mild dread − of course he had gotten it. Brandon was probably wondering what had happened when Broyles had presented it to security on his way into the building. _That_ would have been interesting…

"This raised quite a few eyebrows, Peter. I could only get it on the assurance that it wouldn't be _used_."

This point had been raised numerous times, and Peter was tired of deflecting it. Brandon had assured him that they could assemble a very convincing, but entirely harmless, prop, and Broyles had latched onto the idea with almost childish eagerness − it would save him having to call in some very large favours. Peter's reply had, unbelievably, won them over, despite being a smoking lie:

"They have more advanced tech over there, and they may be able to spot a phony more easily than we would. It's the key to the whole thing – it's _got_ to stand up."

Hiding behind this nonsense, however, was the _true_ reason: he had asked for a real one because he was going to _use_ it, and whether it would destroy only the building and its technology, or also the people therein contained, was up to them. He had experienced almost every emotion he could name during the past few days – disbelief, denial, rage, hate, helplessness – but had now moved past, _through_ them all, as though leaving a planet's atmosphere. What was left to him, this titanic interstellar blackness, had no name; _nihilism _was far too watery a word for it. His sole anchor, his touchstone, had been taken, and until it – she – was returned, he didn't belong here. No, more: he didn't belong _anywhere_. Thus uncoupled, he was free to strategize without regard to his own safety. Or the potential safety, or otherwise, of his enemies.

"But what about conventional explosives? Won't they do?" Broyles had asked. Being in law enforcement, he had that classic knee-jerk reaction to all things "nuclear". It was one of the very few times Peter had actually detected nervousness in the man.

The objection had been dealt with easily, and honestly: to achieve the same psychological effect, he would have had to take more C-4 than twenty men could lift, and he needed the payload to be mobile. Just in case. Besides, he hadn't added, a nuke would evoke a completely different and unique fear, making his opponents all the more pliable. _Just look at the effect it had had on Broyles_, he had thought, _and he's on _our_ side_…

Thus convinced, Broyles had disappeared into the governmental dark alleys to grease palms and twist arms, while Peter and Brandon had indulged themselves in Massive Dynamic's profligate resources and set about creating the rest of the necessary hardware. Brandon had been in his element, despite the use to which their inventions would ultimately be put, and Peter knew he was imagining himself to be Q of the James Bond universe. In truth, most of their creations had a definite Bond-ish tilt; the detonator bracelets were the only exception – Bond had never gambled with his _own_ life. They had instilled in Brandon an uncomfortable association with suicide bombers, but Peter had reminded him that they were merely insurance. He could not afford to be taken out before he had reached her, and _she_ could not be taken out no matter _what_. Hence, there were two of them. To Brandon's question of why Peter's was also equipped with a block of C-4, when it would be assumed to light up a perfectly real suitcase nuke, Peter had simply repeated "insurance". He had not be entirely sure that Broyles would have allowed the thing to proceed if he knew the real reason.

* * *

Peter eyed the black case with no expression at all, Brandon with a blend of fear and curiosity. He seemed to be wondering how such a devastating weapon could be made so compact. The compactness was almost a by-product – Peter's yield calculations suggested that anything larger would cause significant collateral damage, and he wasn't so far gone that he wanted to hurt innocents. On _either_ side. Getting rid of the DoD facility was all he intended to do.

"I was considering only giving this to you on the condition that you take me with you," Broyles said quietly.

They had been over _this_ as well, and Peter had managed to persuade them all that he was the one person the other side _wouldn't _kill, and he had them convinced that hangers-on would more likely end up hostages than be of any help. Only Walter had come within brushing distance of the truth, but had not been able to articulate his suspicions (or had been unwilling to): Peter was coming back with her, or he wasn't coming back. He had taken responsibility for everything that had followed his return on the basis that he, of all of them, should have made Altivia far, _far_ sooner.

"Nice try," Peter replied to Broyles, "but you know the plan. A second man would be redundant. Or worse, a liability."

Broyles seemed to have saved all his objections for D-day, and kept going undeterred, retreading old ground.

"Alright – what about the intelligence you're basing all this on? Can you really trust it, given the source?"

"I took it straight out of her _mind_, Broyles. There was just no mechanism for lying."

Peter, half-insane with fury by this point, had been all for torturing Altivia into drooling imbecile to get answers out of her – she had goaded and taunted him, in particular, ceaselessly since being captured, no doubt hoping he would kill her before she spilled her guts − but Walter had suggested something far cleaner and more reliable. Thus, Peter had re-donned the old metal head-cage and dived into her thoughts.

Her mind had been like an endless, ice-cold plane of polished steel, a perfect illustration of her feelings toward the denizens of this hostile universe. He had felt nauseous at having to review his time with her from her perspective in his search for anything useful. He had felt her twinges of revulsion at his touch. Every dinner date felt like a hot knitting needle through the heart, reminding him just how easily he had fooled himself. He had taken something resembling satisfaction from her violated expression afterwards; she had struggled mightily, but without so much as a moment's success. Now she knew how _he _felt.

More pertinent than her reflections on her mission here, she had also carried an extensive and detailed knowledge of her side's Fringe Division and, thanks to this, Peter had added a second objective to his mission, hence the agglomeration of hard drives he was currently linking together. While he was there, he could at least do some shopping for them.

"And we absolutely _have_ to give her back?" Despite that fact that most of her intelligence had almost certainly been already relayed home via the typewriter, Broyles was understandably reluctant to let her go. Reprehensible as she was, she was also undeniably capable and dangerous, and putting her back into circulation, if even in a different universe, did not sit well.

"Walter says having her there for exchange will maintain a balance and make it easier for Olivia to get us home. I'm no happier about it than you – she's done a fair amount of reconnaissance and there's nothing we can do about it. This," he said, indicating his impromptu NAS device, "should at least even the score."

"You're counting on our Dunham being in any shape to get you home, or being willing to do so if she _is_."

"Walternate would never have made this exchange for just the one potential advantage. Having Olivia there has given him access to a risk- and tech-free way of crossing over, and he won't ignore that. It may even have been his main goal; having _his_ Dunham _here_ could just be a nice side-benefit. It may have been the other way around, though – she was probably supposed to take those two Weapon pieces back with her."

Broyles reflected on just how close she had come to doing just that. A play for Peter would have followed in short order, and with the need for subtlety no longer applying, it would have been ugly.

"There's no way Olivia would willingly help him, and that leaves coercion. Torture? Maybe, but given their tech, a more sophisticated brainwashing than we could manage may also be possible. In the first case I'll have no problems getting her out. In the second… that's what the tranks are for, and I'll have to find some way of getting home on my own. But one way or the other, she's not staying there."

Broyles was wary of the icy resolve in Peter's voice. He had clearly passed into some darkness devoid of emotion, and such a man was capable of almost anything. While this had its advantages – a total lack of fear, primarily − it made such people unstable, insensitive to danger. He wondered again at the wisdom of handing this Peter a live nuclear warhead, but the three blackboards' worth of calculations he could still see on the other side of the lab suggested that

(_when_)

if it did go off, it would be as surgical as a _nuclear explosion_ could possibly be.

He went to prepare the prisoner for transport, leaving the scientists to their work. Dealing with the spitting and snarling Altivia would drive all thoughts of A-bombs from his mind, he was sure.

* * *

Six hours later, with the sun going down, Peter, Walter and Broyles stood a-circle in the old Harvard lab around two cases, one black, one heavily-shielded aluminium, holding the completed fruits of Peter and Brandon's week's labours. It was a strange and incongruous selection, and an outsider would discern no purpose to most of it. If one existed, and was consulted, a list would have read:

_Nuclear warhead, with attached digital inclinometers and smoke alarm;_

_2 x vital signs monitoring bracelets, with wireless RF transmitters (50 km range);_

_Telephone-driven wireless transmitter;_

_20 x 2TB solid state hard drives, with umbrella Ethernet interface;_

_Microdot audio/video camera, with handheld remote viewer._

Along with these, Peter would be taking two silenced Glock 18 machine pistols, each with a full thirty-round magazine, a tranquilizer pistol with ten darts, and several pairs of handcuffs. Peter held a vague hope that the weaponry would go unused, but was not optimistic. Despite being totally untrained in such matters as these, he gauged his willingness to kill for this mission, and found that he was certain he could. The realization would have dismayed him a week ago. Not now.

Walter, clearly disturbed by this vaguely menacing toolbox, was totally unconcerned about the atomic bomb sitting on the bench, instead engrossed in trying again to get Peter to change his mind about his one man mission. Having been warned by apparent supernatural beings that Peter should never, ever be allowed to go back, he was barely controlling his terror at the prospect of his son returning after what had happened last time. Broyles observed this with pity, knowing that Peter would almost certainly have to lie to his father to get out of here with his equipment. He had sensed the translucent capsules of half-truth in which Peter had wrapped his previous answers, but knew the old man hadn't. He hadn't seen that perfect vacuum behind his son's eyes, either.

"Peter… it doesn't have to be you. There are special outfits for this thing, aren't there?" He cast around for the name, gesturing to Broyles for help. "Uh, Uh… HRT, right? We can brief them on everything they need to know…"

Broyles was moved by the old man's desperation, and yet more moved that he would be unable to assuage his very appropriate fear. Peter's reply was almost sickening in its insincerity, as had been all the previous ones every time this argument had come up.

"Don't worry." Soothing, placating. Facile, nothing more. "They won't dare kill me, they know they'll need me eventually."

"But… but what if they just _capture_ you! They need you to power the Weapon! You're walking right into their hands!"

"They have people over here, Walter – if they really wanted me yet I think we'd have known by now. Besides, we have two pieces. You can ransom them if need be." He had used almost exactly the same reasoning to silence Astrid. Almost word for word. She had been more dubious, but had acquiesced, seeing the twisted logic.

Broyles watched Walter struggle to come up with more, or _better_, arguments, and fail. He knew the senior Bishop wanted Olivia back very much – perhaps not as much as the younger Bishop – but could not stand idly by while his son went into very real danger without at least trying to dissuade him. Broyles also knew that Peter's assurances were not coming from love; they were coming from _necessity_: had he not needed their help he would have been over there already, most likely scything his way through the enemy like a saw blade tipped with scalpels, daring them to kill him, and seal their own doom by doing so.

"Alright, Peter. But I want your _word_: you will come back. Alive."

Peter knew he had finally won, but played the game, taking his father's cheek in his hand and locking his eyes. He made a supreme effort to put some sort of emotion on them. He wasn't sure precisely _which_ emotion emerged, but his father's face slackened slightly, so whatever it was, it had done the trick.

"I swear, " he said solemnly, not meaning it in the slightest. It wouldn't be up to him if he came back alive.

He wasn't eager for death, but nor was he perturbed at all by its possible imminence. On the contrary: great meaning seemed to have been attached to his life, but not meaning of his own making, and trusting to it luck would be a very satisfying middle finger to those who would play God with him.

* * *

Walter, satisfied by Peter's promise, had deigned to help them, offering the first bracelet to Peter's upper arm and testing the monitors. The bracelets operated very simply: a variety of sensors made sure the wearer was alive and conscious, and if it discovered that he or she was not both, or that it been removed forcibly without the key, it would emit a modulated radio wave − made up of three different frequencies to guard against the possibility of accidental… response. Peter was the only one who knew that there would be an actual receiver on the nuke that _would_ respond – he had had to weave it into the mix in the hour after he'd sent Brandon home and before Broyles had return, along with the inclinometers and jerry-rigged smoke alarms guts.

"Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature... all loud and clear. Brainwaves… yes, here they are." Walter's tone was business-like, and Peter and Broyles were both glad, but for very different reasons.

"So this thing will definitely catch on if somebody knocks me out?"

"Yes, unconsciousness will suppress the brainwaves and trip the alarm. I'll set an appropriate threshold for both you and Olivia; I have copious amounts of data from her visits to the Tank."

Walter paused here, mulling. He was on the verge of some great realization but couldn't quite grab hold of it. Peter mentally held his breath − If his father put two and two together and said it out loud, it would crystallize Broyles' doubts and the whole thing could grind to a halt here and now.

"Peter… this is all just for show, isn't it? The bomb is just insurance, surely." Trying to convince not Peter but himself. He had asked a question, but more than anything had wanted to frame it as a statement: _Peter, this is all real. This thing will go up like Hiroshima if they don't do what you want_.

Broyles watched Peter very carefully as he replied.

"Yes, of course it is, but it has to be a real one in case they use some of their tech to scan it; all these bracelets do is flash and bleep."

He couldn't tell whether this was a lie or not. Maybe Peter himself didn't know.

Thus persuaded and placated, Walter snapped the bracelet's ratchet shut, locking it to his son's arm. He handed Peter the key, which he placed in his shirt pocket. Walter offered up the second bracelet, tested it like the first, and pronounced it working perfectly. He removed it and tinkered with the delta wave threshold to better fit Olivia's brain, consulting his notes occasionally, and humming.

* * *

After a few minutes he was done. He handed Peter the second bracelet, which he clipped to his belt. Peter turned to Broyles.

"Ready?"

Broyles, not trusting himself to speak, could only nod. He was not used to taking a back seat during field operations, and the prospect of trusting this wild-card with a bomb that

(_would_)

could vaporize the Stature of Liberty went against his every instinct.

Between them they packed the goodies into their appropriate cases and carried them out to the SUV. Broyles carried the bomb, determined to keep an eye on it for as long as possible. Walter followed, not carrying anything, apparently determined to make one last attempt to restrain his son. As Peter slammed the trunk shut, he felt his father's hand around his elbow. He prepared himself for another go-around, but he was surprised. All the old man said was

"Son… please, be careful."

It was spoken quietly, in that one-octave-lower serious-Walter voice, and Peter felt the first barest wisp of indecision. He smothered it instantly, but favoured his father with a smile and a sincere "I will." He removed Walter's hand from his elbow and held it briefly before opening the passenger door and joining Broyles in the cabin. The sun had almost completely set by now, leaving only a glowing orange stripe across the horizon. As the car started, Peter realized that this could well have been the last sunset he would ever see. The realization did not affect him in the least. On the contrary − it was completely appropriate: he would either see his next sunrise with Olivia back home, or he wouldn't see one.

Broyles opened his window and addressed Walter.

"Agent Farnsworth will be here in half an hour. You'll need to start working on a way to reverse this potential brainwashing – we might need it."

Walter chuckled, truly amused for the first time in days.

"Agent Broyles, we already _have_ it – the Tank will be able to recover her repressed memories if we need to. Send Asterix over anyway – we can play Monopoly until Peter comes back."

Broyles kept his features as neutral as possible, but they had tried to go from relief to exasperation in a fraction of a second. He settled for a helpless nod, and rolled his window up. They pulled out of the parking lot, Broyles turning the headlights on.

"So… where are we going?"

Peter's face tried to grin, but the resulting expression was chilling. Broyles hoped never to see it again. Peter pulled a Post-It note off the dashboard and wrote something on it, before putting it in the pocket with the bracelet key.

"A junk shop." He keyed the address into the GPS, and upon seeing it Broyles called for backup, telling them to stay one block away until further notice.

They drove on in silence.


	2. Code Red

The sky had lost its orange stratum and had dwindled to an ominous blue-black as Peter and Broyles parked around the corner from the shop. Broyles had noted that backup had, indeed, arrived, and had maintained a discreet distance. Despite Peter's telling him that the place was usually only manned by the owner – who wasn't in the best of health – he was taking no chances. He rolled to a stop, but left the engine running. He turned to Peter.

"Okay – it's your show from here on in. How d'you wanna play it?"

Peter leaned over the back seat and returned with one of the Glocks. He drew its slide partway back, saw a glint of brass that meant it was chambered, and released it. He thought for a moment, looking pensive, but not afraid.

"I've seen this guy, or rather _she's_ seen him, and he shouldn't be any trouble if I get the drop on him. I'll go in alone and secure the place before you come in with the gear. No sense in tipping him off – he might have a panic button."

Broyles nodded his assent; it was exactly what he would have done. So far, so good. He checked his watch. It was 7.55. According to Altivia, the owner would be closing up for the night.

Peter deposited his pistol in the back of his pants, concealed it with his coat, and opened the car door, pausing once he had gotten out to take a deep breath in through his nose. For anybody else it would have been a calming breath, but Broyles, knowing Peter was, for the moment, mentally off-the-radar, could not attribute it to that. He killed the engine, and said through the open car door

"I'll have somebody come in with me to take him into custody. He might be able to give us some of his previous visitors."

Peter knew he was thinking of the head-cage, and silently applauded him. He was finally beginning to see what it would take to win this thing. He took Broyles' proffered radio and switched it on before putting it in his waistband with the Glock. Broyles used his own radio to call for radio-silence from the backup teams.

Broyles gave the pistol a heavy glance, wondering whether Peter would be able to discern properly when and when not to use it. He decided that, though the young man was driven, he wasn't being driven by anything as clichéd as revenge. No… this was something else entirely, something whose name

(_penance?_)

danced away when he tried to grab it. His musings were interrupted by Peter's question.

"You got any cuffs I can use? I don't want to dip into the toy box before I have to."

"Glove compartment."

Peter leaned back into the cab and took three pairs, putting them in his pants pocket. After checking that the Glock's safety was off, and returning the gun to his pants, he gave Broyles a bracing nod and closed the car door.

Though the walk took only a couple of minutes, he used the time to twist and turn Phase One and examine it from every possible angle. Looking for holes he would have to plug. He knew that in the event of a Code Red the other side was capable of yanking Altivia right from the typewriter room, as they had taken him and Walternate from the Northwest Passage motel the previous year. It would cost them an enormous amount of power to do it, but their agent being made, and having escaped with the Weapon pieces they had sent her there for, would render all that moot. Her mind had told him that they would bring her right into the facility's main laboratory, where the crossing-over tech was installed. That had been extremely lucky: arriving outside and trying to get _in_ with a nuclear bomb would have been beyond impossible and well into folly. Inside, however, there would be little to no surveillance – everything operated by means of biometrics, so a stranger just wandering in was extremely unlikely. If they managed to get out with their lives, he thought, that policy would be changed in very short order.

Beyond this, he knew nothing. There could be meek and frightened scientists in that room, or armed guards − the most dangerous part of the operation would be those first few seconds after he materialized. He couldn't arm the bomb until he got there, being unsure how it would respond to being "beamed up" in an active state. During those first few seconds they could kill him without reprisal, and he would have very little time to secure the room and make his intentions known. He wondered what would happen if they _did _manage to kill him… Walternate's reaction upon seeing his doomsday device's intended power source dead at his feet. In spite of what it would entail, Peter grinned internally at the prospect − his side would win there and then.

He pulled himself out of his reverie and looked to his left in surprise – he was here, and he had very nearly walked right past the place. He shook his head ruefully before looking up and down the street. He saw no-one else.

* * *

He pushed the door open gently, wincing at the tinkling bell that accompanied the action, and briefly took in the odd collection of bric-a-brac before focusing himself on the cash register, which the shopkeeper was in the process of emptying. He half-turned towards him and uttered in a bored, "I've said this a thousand times" tone

"I'm closing."

For the barest moment, the man actually resumed counting his takings. Then he stopped, stock still, and turned as though being compelled to do so, like an action figure being manipulated by some giant hand. His eyes landed on the very large handgun aimed at his chest, less than six feet in front of him. The eyes widened in shock, and he took a ragged breath. His hands rose automatically in a comical "stick-em-up" gesture.

During the planning stage, Peter had briefly considered simply walking in, posing as one of their agents, and asking for the non-existent Selectric as they would, but had decided not to for two reasons: the shopkeeper might know who he was, and blow the whistle, and having the shopkeeper in custody would allow them to both interrogate him and obliterate the building once he had crossed over, cutting a vital channel of the enemy's communication and sending a very loud message.

He had also considered, even more briefly, simply busting in and shooting the place up. However, since Altivia didn't know which key opened the room's door – she apparently didn't share Olivia's eidetic memory – he would waste precious time hunting it down.

Thus, here he was, his weapon trained. He reached behind him, without looking, and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. It was too dark outside for anyone to look in and observe this apparent robbery. Besides, it was too cold for anyone to be out on foot at this time of night, and this street wasn't exactly the best place for Christmas shopping…

"Where's the key?"

He was amazed at the quietness, the _evenness_ in his voice, how steady the weapon's muzzle was. He had asked the question almost _casually_. The shopkeeper, utterly wrong footed, hesitated, before pathetically feigning ignorance.

"Wh… what key?"

The words had barely left his mouth when Peter turned the pistol very slightly to his left and fired. A camera behind the owner jumped as if a firecracker had gone off inside and spat the remains of its lens onto the floor. The sounds the camera made were far louder than that of the pistol. The muzzle returned to dead centre, stock still again. Peter had not flinched.

"Last chance." More menace this time, but that same quietness. "It'll take longer, but I can kill you and find it myself." He took a step forward to emphasize the point. The shopkeeper, still shocked at the warning shot, gathered his thoughts, and caved in utterly. He knew if he didn't obey, he would die.

"It's on my belt," he whispered, lowering his hands with ponderous slowness and parting his jacket to reveal a key ring. It would take at least five minutes to try every key, if indeed _the_ key was on there, so Peter decided to use the man.

"Step out from behind the counter and turn around." The shopkeeper did.

"Put your hands behind your back." The shopkeeper did.

Keeping the gun out of the man's possible reach, Peter produced a pair of Broyles' handcuffs from his pocket and snicked them around the shopkeeper's wrists. Satisfied that they were snug, he instructed

"Lead the way,"

and followed a short distance behind.

The corridor was extremely long and perfectly straight, yet with no doors leading off it. It seemed to serve no purpose at all (if this had been a shop). He recognized it from Altivia's mind, even the slightly musky old-book smell. The shopkeeper tottered slightly as he walked, but Peter knew this wasn't a diversionary tactic; the man was ill. Before long they had reached the door. The man halted, and Peter drew up next to him.

"I'm going to unclip your key ring, and then you're going to tell me which key. If the first key I try isn't the right one, I'll shoot you in the belly and try the rest while you bleed out. Do you understand?"

The man nodded, apparently no longer capable of speech. Peter pressed the pistol against his neck and, very slowly, bent down to take the key ring. He straightened and held the key ring flat in his palm, less than a foot in front of the shopkeeper's face.

_Which?_

"The… the one with the triangular top." There was only one such key, so Peter selected it and moved around between the shopkeeper and the door. As he had been told/shown, the door was extremely well made, and breaking in without damaging the room's contents would have been difficult. Without taking his eyes from his hostage, he reached behind himself and offered the key to the lock, but paused.

"Before I do this, are you _absolutely_ sure this is the right one?" He continued to be surprised at the black malevolence his voice had acquired. The shopkeeper nodded jerkily. Of course it was – he was about ready to piss his pants. He slid the key home and turned it. It moved with absolutely no resistance − this door was obviously in great demand. It opened in complete silence, letting no light out.

"Sit down, on the floor."

The man complied, with great difficulty, having real trouble keeping his balance without his arms free, sliding down the wall in order to stay upright. Satisfied that he was no longer a threat, if he had ever been one in the first place, Peter turned and took in the room, switching on the lamp on the desk.

* * *

There was the typewriter, and the mirror, on a completely unassuming wooden table. The walls, lit by that solitary tungsten bulb, were a ghastly, old-paper yellow colour, and strewn with indecypherable graffiti. The room carried an air of old, _ancient_ menace. He wondered how many enemies had come in here to receive their orders, and for how long, before getting back on the clock. He swapped the radio in his waistband for the pistol.

"Broyles?"

"Yeah."

"I'm in, whenever you're ready. Only need one guy for the shopkeeper." He favoured the man with a glance; his horrified eyes rolled up to meet Peter's. They seemed to scream _Please, no – they'll KILL me!_ Peter felt nothing – not pity, nor smugness.

After a minute or so, the shop's bell tinkled again.

"Peter?" Broyles called.

"Down here."

The outlines of two men appeared at the other end of the corridor and, eventually, arrived at the door. Broyles was carrying the cases, and joined Peter in the room. He nodded to his subordinate, who nodded in return and heaved the stricken shopkeeper to his feet.

"I'll be seeing you soon," Broyles muttered, his voice dripping with dark anticipation. Given the way he had responded to this threat, however, Peter doubted that the man would be of much use. The other siders had probably told him exactly what he needed to know, but no more. Everything they did was predicated on secrecy and redundancy. The agent departed with his charge, who offered no resistance, probably hoping he would be safer in custody that out of it. Broyles gave the typewriter room a proper examination.

"Wow," he muttered. "If I believed in ghosts, I'd say "haunted"."

Peter empathized. The room was almost… half there. It was difficult to put into words. He suspected that the room itself played more of a part in the inter-universe communication that the typewriter itself. Perhaps it was a thin spot.

The sight of the two cases in Broyles' hands brought him back to the present. Peter took the black case, set it on the floor, and opened it. He felt Broyles squash an involuntary wince as the nuke's guts were exposed. The timer was pure Hollywood, and ordinarily would never have featured, but Peter knew its gigantic blood-red digital numerals would serve as a tightening screw for his enemies.

"What are you doing?" Broyles asked.

"Checking the smoke alarm," Peter replied, sliding a Post-It between the alarm's sensors. An ominous red LED lit and went out, lit and went out. He checked that the nine-volt battery was snug. It was a brand new one.

While it appeared to all the world that this was _all_ he was doing, he was also activating the receiver for the biometric bracelets. He had waited until now to do so; Brandon would have caught him had he tried it earlier, and would have tattled. The receiver confirmed that it was talking to Peter's bracelet. Satisfied, he set the trigger and closed the case. The next time it would opened, the nuke would be armed. Closing it again after that would do no good. He set the cases down three feet apart in the middle of the room. He would step between them when the time came, but wouldn't carry them over; he needed his hands free for the pistols.

"OK, now what?" Broyles asked, turning to the table behind them. In response, Peter sat down in the chair and cracked his knuckles. Broyles leaned over his shoulder, giving the oval mirror a curious glance. There was already a sheet of paper in the typewriter, so Peter would the cylinder to put the paper as low as possible. He didn't know how much back-and-forth would ensue, and wanted to leave enough space.

As his hands reached forward to rest on the keyboard, Peter felt a chill. The moment carried a cold portentousness: a lot would be decided this night. He allowed the feeling to dissipate, and began to type, exactly what Alitivia's mind had told him he should. He knew that somebody would be on the other end, day and night, to receive these communiqués. He hoped they were paying attention…

**CODE RED. CODE RED. CODE RED. AUTH 520 170 8454.**

Altivia's Fringe Division ID number. Peter didn't know how long he would have to wait for a reply, but no sooner had he begun to wonder when the typewriter began to make sounds. Queer sounds. Keystrokes being played backwards. But the typewriter's keys weren't moving. They looked to their right, into the mirror, and saw the mirror-typewriter's keys dancing merrily. They examined the paper:

**UNDERSTOOD. CAN YOU HOLD POSITION FOR 3 MINUTES?**

They would need as long to power their extraction tech.

**YES.**

He then gave them a carrot.

**BE ADVISED – I WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY APPROX 150 POUNDS OF EQUIPMENT**

He could see them now, driven into a frenzy at having their Weapon pieces finally in their hands.

**UNDERSTOOD. CHARGE TIME WILL INCREASE TO 6.5 MINUTES**. **CAN YOU HOLD?**

**YES**.

There was no more. Apparently the party on their end had left. Peter stood up and turned to his cases.

Broyles felt his heart pick up speed. Until this very moment he had part-hoped that the whole thing would amount to nothing. No such luck. In about four minutes' time, this heedless nihilist would appear out of nowhere in enemy territory with a live nuclear bomb. He knew he would question the wisdom of this for years to come, no matter which way it went down. He could only hope that he would be kicking himself for being right, rather than wrong…

Peter give him his radio – he wouldn't need it now – and bent to open the aluminium case. From it he withdrew the other Glock, which was sheathed in a shoulder holster. He took off his peacoat and long-sleeved sweater, leaving himself in his white vest. All the better to show his deadly bling. He took the shoulder holster and threaded himself into it, locking the buckle and cinching it tight. The Glock dangled under his left armpit, its extra-long magazine jutting out in front of him; it was a good job there would be no need to conceal it.

"Two minutes," Broyles warned, consulting his watch.

Peter then turned his attention to the hard-drive stack in the case. He had equipped it with the lightest power supply he could fashion, and turned it on. It would give only five or six hours' juice, which was part of the reason he had chosen solid state drives; the other was their lightness and resistance to shock. The shielding he had added to the case would protect it in the event that the enemy tried to scupper the drives with an EMP, but made the case quite heavy. He pulled the Ethernet plug from the concealed hole to test the lead's spring loaded retraction. It worked.

"One minute."

"OK, time to go, Broyles," Peter replied. It was imperative that Peter be alone with the cases when they were pulled out − the masses had to match, or the other side would know something was up. Peter had added told them to expect 150 pounds when, in fact, his cases taken together weighed no more than a hundred; the extra was to cover the difference between his weight and Altivia's. Broyles seized his left elbow, exactly as his father had done earlier in the evening.

"You're _sure_…" His expression was almost beseeching, and Peter was not annoyed, only grateful. The man obviously cared about him.

"Broyles… I owe her."

It was as close to an emotion as he had come for a long time, and Broyles nodded, finally convinced. Peter knew he was remembering _her_ rescue of _him_ last year. He did not correct him – he owed her for a lot more than that now, whether she knew it or not, but he would die before he ever told Broyles what it was he had done. Only Walter knew, and he had been sworn to secrecy. Altivia also knew, of course, but she would be in no position to tell anybody he cared about after tonight, or he would be dead and beyond all caring anyway.

Broyles turned to leave, but Peter stopped him and forced something into his hand. A Post-It, wrapped around something small and hard.

"Open it once I've gone, and for God's sake – keep it safe. I'll need it"

Broyles opened his mouth to question, but was prevented from doing so by the sound that had arisen from the room. It was like wind blowing over the top of an open bottle. A large bottle – the sound was deep and hollow.

"Better go!" Peter spoke loudly over it, stepping between his cases. Broyles left the room, closing the door behind him. Despite Peter's instructions, he unraveled the Post-It, and his stomach fell to his knees when he saw what was inside. Peter Bishop, he finally realized, was going all-in.

* * *

The room was now a hurricane of chaos and noise; its air had taken on an ozone-charge. Peter pulled one Glock out of the back of his pants and set the fire selector to full-auto. He drew the other from its holster and did the same. There was no way to know which way he would be facing when he reappeared in the facility, so he did the best he could, and crouched between the cases with his arms bent, weapons pointing forwards, outwards and slightly upwards. _Give them a small target_.

The noise reached a crescendo and, impossibly, a breeze arose − where the hell was _that_ coming from? _Between_, his mind answered cryptically. He looked down at himself, noticing a blue-white effulgent aura surrounding him and his equipment. The aura spread and became brighter, illuminating the whole room. He closed his eyes against it.

After some indeterminate amount of time, both the light and the noise ceased, chopped off cleanly as if a recording had been stopped. He sensed, beyond his eyelids, a clean, cold white light that was different from the dreadful single-bulb illumination of the typewriter room. He opened his eyes.


	3. The Payload

He had placed enormous emphasis on what would happen in these next ten seconds, coaching himself to recognize every facet of the situation as quickly as he possibly could. He knew he would have the advantage of surprise, but that it would diminish rapidly the longer he stood there looking around.

His eyes popped open the instant that ghastly blue-white light fell away, and his first thought was that he had been lucky beyond all measure: he was facing into the lab, and knew a wall was behind him. His eyes swiveled from left to right, taking in the entire room. Again, he had been lucky – there was nothing behind which anybody could take cover; the only thing of any substance was the large metallic tank off to his left. The room reminded him of their new facilities at Massive Dynamic. Cold. Austere. So like _them_.

He glimpsed four people, one in a lab coat and three in uniforms. The uniformed men were armed, he saw, but had not drawn their weapons. They weren't in here for any particular reason, it seemed – it was probably protocol whenever the crossover tech was used. Not having their weapons readied was their first mistake and, as he noticed the hand of one of them gravitate towards his holster, Peter consigned himself to the fact that it would also be their last. He rose to a standing position, the crossover platform giving him a couple of extra inches of height. He paused for the merest fraction, seeing if the troops would go through with their intention to draw. Their hands kept moving, despite their faces being slack with utter surprise, so Peter opened fire.

The things made an ungodly noise – a staccato string of dreadful sparrow-tweets that was, somehow, far more appalling than the portentous BANGS of unsilenced weapons. The troops, their sidearms now forever out of reach, juddered backwards and then fell dead; Peter had discerned at least one head-shot to each. It had been less than five seconds since his arrival.

He gauged his reaction at having just killed three people. Not eighteen months ago he had shot a man in self defence, as an absolute last resort, and had not slept for the following two nights. Now, though, looking at these three bodies, men he had killed who were only doing their jobs, no less, he was sure that when – if – he got home he would sleep like a rock. It boded well – he might be responsible for many, _many_ more deaths if Walternate didn't play ball…

Disregarding the now-dead troops, he turned his attention to the lab's one remaining occupant, who had, incredibly, made it almost all the way to the door off to the right.

"BRANDON!" Peter called, warningly.

The young man stopped dead, his arm half-raised as if to open the door. What had made him stop Peter couldn't decide – it could have been the fact that he'd just cut three men down before his eyes, but it could equally have been the fact that the executioner had recognized him. Called his _name_. He was dressed far more smartly than _his_ Brandon, his lab coat obviously over a crisp suit. It helped reinforce the fact that these people only _looked _like his friends.

"Step back, into the middle of the room."

Brandon complied, haltingly, and Peter stepped down from the platform to join him. Taking in the young man's face, he knew he wouldn't need any restraints. This Brandon was as much a scientist as his own, and just as little a gung-ho hero wannabe. Peter backed away, putting his right-hand pistol in its holster but keeping the left one trained on the scientist just in case. The muzzle was still smoking. He positioned himself beside the lab's entrance, knowing that Walternate would be arriving any minute to debrief Altivia, since he wasn't here already. He adjusted his aim, putting his sights right between Brandon's eyes. Even from ten feet away, those eyes widened slightly – the boy looked as if he were staring into his own open grave. Peter raised his index finger to his lips and made a shushing gesture. Brandon's head jittered frantically in what Peter interpreted to be a nod. They stood in silence for several minutes.

* * *

Peter heard, from outside the lab, the sound of a key-code being entered, and words being exchanged. There were _two_ people out there, one of whom he knew to be Walternate. He hoped the other one wasn't a soldier; he had left the tranquilizer pistol in the aluminium suitcase, and there was at least a possibility that he wouldn't have to kill this one. He would have arrived with the trank gun, but it took too long to reload, and he hadn't known how many foes he would encounter.

From outside, the code panel issued an affirmative bleep, and the door opened. Again, he was lucky: the men were deep in conversation, and their attention was on each other rather on the room. They had taken several steps inside before they noticed anything was wrong, by which time it was already too late. Peter was neutrally grateful that he now wouldn't need to kill the soldier, whom he had realized was (Colonel) Broyles. Apparently he had been briefed on the Altivia operation since she had left.

"Hey," Peter said quietly from behind them, kicking the lab door shut. The had both just taken in the three dead men, and Brandon stranded in the middle of the room, and they turned as one to face him. Walternate's eyes took in his son; Broyles' took in only the weapon in his hand. His brow knotted at this effrontery, and Peter used the confusion to lock the lab's door.

"Hands were I can see 'em," he ordered, reading Broyles' intention to try a quick draw. The soldier complied, his face a picture of mutinous grudging. He would have to be dealt with first, as he was the most likely to try something before the bomb was armed. Peter reached into his right hand pocket and withdrew a pair of handcuffs. He threw them to Walternate.

"Cuff his hands behind his back."

Walternate made absolutely no move to comply, whether due to sheer confusion or outright defiance Peter couldn't tell. Didn't care. He wasn't out of the woods yet. To emphasize his point he pulled the trigger, another of those awful _chirrups_ rending the air. Walternate's pants leg rippled – Peter had missed his left thigh by less than an inch; the resulting silence was such that the spent casing could be heard bouncing away on the floor. A searing urge to simply blow the man's head off had flared into being. He suppressed it – the Secretary was his exit.

"Now," he added.

Incredibly, Broyles exchanged a look with Walternate. A _consulting_ look. Even held at gunpoint, Broyles was deferring utterly − the man's authority must have been enormous. Still, Broyles turned his back and presented his wrists, which Walternate locked together. Peter sensed a gigantic weight depart from his shoulders. The lab was secure, and would have been declared off-limits before Walternate came down, and the most dangerous man in the room had been made safe. Still, he had to unveil his insurance policy…

He had sat Broyles against the wall behind the platform after disarming him and, for good measure, had had Walternate handcuff himself to the low rail that encircled the platform. He now had Brandon alone to deal with. Walternate had not tried parlaying. Yet. Peter's warning shot seemed to have quelled him, but he had no doubt that the mind games would begin very soon. The man wouldn't be able to help himself.

"Brandon, pick up the black case and put it on the big bench over there."

Again, one of those consulting looks aimed at the Secretary. Peter wished he was able to kill the man – it would solve so many problems down the line – but he couldn't. He was blood. He considered another warning shot, but Brandon had already moved to capitulate. Walternate had apparently sensed no danger yet, and was content to let the play continue.

Brandon had hauled the larger case onto the largest bench, carrying it carefully – whatever was inside couldn't be good…

"Open it."

He hesitated for a long moment, but his eyes found Peter's pistol once more, and he obeyed. Peter saw his face fall in both shock and recognition. He was silent for a long time, his eyes darting to and fro.

"Describe it." Brandon jumped.

He knew that this would carry significant weight coming from a scientist, and that his other two hostages would be more inclined to believed him than Peter himself. He had intended originally to open the bomb himself and show it to whoever was left alive, but the scientist's presence here from the start was a fortunate happenstance. Perhaps he could use their tech to confirm its authenticity…

Brandon's mouth opened, but nothing came out for a while, aside from a thunderstruck "uuuuuhhhh". If capable of glee, Peter would have felt it.

"It's a nuke," he finally managed to get out in a strangled whisper.

Walternate and Broyles exchanged another look, but this time it wasn't smug consultation. Walternate regrouped almost immediately, though, his face that of a poker player who has just been hit with an outrageous bluff that he couldn't wait to call. He addressed Peter for the first time, his voice low and silky. Cajoling.

"Peter, I can only assume you've discovered our rouse, so it's obvious why you're here, and you'd never bring anything that could hurt her." Even handcuffed, in the presence of an armed hostage-taker, the man's slithering, insidious manipulating could not be restrained. "If only you'd let us _examine_ it…"

Peter leaned casually against the wall behind him, his gun now held more loosely at his side. This was all going far too well. Brandon's head came around, as if automatically, to look at him. Peter shrugged, keeping his weapon pointed downwards. Brandon, this time, did not wait for permission from the Secretary, instead walking slowly, keeping his hands visible, to a panel at the far corner of the room. Peter glanced at Walternate, and noticed with satisfaction that that smug condescension had disappeared. His authority had been usurped. Triflingly, yes, but that hadn't made it taste any better.

Brandon pressed a sequence of buttons on the wall panel and a hollow square of greenish/yellow light flared into being in the ceiling above the bench. The light pulsed and modulated, changing colour slightly in places, before dimming and going out. Brandon stared at the wall panel for a long time before moving back to the middle of the room. His look at Walternate said more than any words ever could: _it's real, and I've armed it_. The gratuitously large timer was visible to all: **1:58:02**, and counting.

* * *

Walternate's face changed here, displaying not fear, not quite – he would probably never allow such a weakness − but the look of a man who was very rapidly reassessing his situation. Peter watched this with detached interest. He had put the old reptile on the back foot and, judging by this expression, he was not at all used to being there. He was seeing his God-like power over this place eroding before his eyes, like a sandcastle being eaten away by surf. Peter had the idea that this worried him more than the live nuclear warhead sitting not fifteen feet away from him. Deciding to press his advantage, Peter delivered his monologue. He had practised it a lot, and it came out utterly and completely flat.

"OK, here we are. There's an atomic bomb sitting in this room, and I'll tell you right now that it _is_ going to go off, just under two hours from now. I couldn't stop the countdown if I wanted to – one way or the other, this place will be a smoking hole in the ground by the end of the day." Had this been a lie, Peter knew he would have had difficulty making himself believed, so he had made sure it _wasn't_ a lie when he had stripped all the safety measures off the thing before packing it.

All three faces registered this pronouncement – Brandon's with barely-controlled terror, Broyles' with frowning denial, and Walternate's with shrewd appraisal. Peter wasn't threatening them, merely stating facts.

"If I get what I want, I'll let you evacuate the base and the surrounding area before it happens. If not, we all die down here."

Walternate could apparently no longer contain himself.

"Son, please. You would never kill yourself _and_ her just to get even with me!"

Peter did not respond, continuing as if there had been no interruption. He let the outrageously large timer answer the challenge.

"The bomb has countermeasures. There are inclinometers and an accelerometer," (Brandon unconsciously took a ginger step away from the bench), "so if you try to move it, it goes off. There's a smoke alarm, so if you try quarantine amber, it goes off. There's a proximity sensor, which I'll switch on before we leave, so if anybody comes near it, it goes off."

Walternate sneaked a look at Brandon, silently asking for confirmation. The barest nod. No help there. He went back to his furious analyses.

"This," he indicated the thing around his upper arm, "is vital sign monitor. If I'm killed or rendered unconscious, the bomb goes off. If you cut my arm off it will lose its lock on my heart rate and blood pressure. There's also a manual override in case you get cute." He glanced at Broyles here, knowing exactly what the man had been thinking of: having the shit beaten out of him without knocking him out. Peter walked over to his two confined hostages.

"See this?" He bent down to show them. "This is C-4. If I'm killed or rendered unconscious once we leave the base, this will take out the offending parties into the bargain. Again, there's a manual override, and the C-4 goes up with the bomb at the end of the countdown, so you won't be keeping me here." Their eyes landed on the miniature countdown emblazoned across the bracelet. It matched the bomb's countdown precisely.

Peter saw the unspoken assumption on Walternate's face. The snake was still twisting and turning, looking for holes, openings to exploit: _how are these things supposed to set the bomb off once you're off the base? We're under a hundred feet of rock and steel! Once you're outside we'll see what's what…_

Peter leaned past his father, without acknowledging his presence at all, and took the aluminium case from the platform. He lifted it onto a small metal table nearby, on which was a phone, and opened it. He felt completely safe presenting his back to Brandon now. He, of all of them, had fully accepted what was happening. He pulled out the relay he and (his) Brandon had made. It looked like an old dial-up modem with a wireless transceiver attached to it, which was exactly what it was. He indicated the phone the Brandon.

"Does this get an outside line?"

"Yes. Press nine." Absolutely no hesitation. All his hopes and dreams had clearly been crushed and compressed into a single supernova of desire: to get this psychopath off the base so he could leave himself. Still, Peter had to check – this thing was crucial. He picked the phone up, pressed nine, then called 911. As soon as the cool female voice answered he put the phone down before disconnecting it from the wall, adding a doubling adapter, and reconnecting the phone along with the relay. He switched the relay on, extending its antenna, and after a few seconds a trio of green bars lit up on the top. It was talking to the bomb.

"That's tied in to the outside line. These bracelets have a fifty kilometer range, so they can light the bomb up via dial-up any time before we go home. If the signal drops out… game over, so I wouldn't cut the outside line. Or pull this out of the wall."

Walternate's nascent plan, one he didn't even know he was building, collapsed. He began working on a new one, sure he could find some way out of this.

Broyles took all this in with mounting horror. He wasn't as far gone as Brandon, but his priority was shifting very slowly from intervention to evacuation and damage control. Completely against his will, his eyes flicked to the timer. **1:51:16**.

* * *

"Alright, son: what is it you want?"

They all knew, making the question pointless, but Peter denied them the satisfaction of hearing the answer. Instead, he removed the last items from the grey case, put Broyles' exotic-looking weapon inside, and closed and locked it, spinning the numerals. He tucked the tranquilizer pistol into the front of his pants.

"Brandon, take the case." He almost fell over in his desire to obey.

"See this?" He indicated the retractable cord in the case's bottom corner. "You're gonna take this case to the server room and copy everything from the AF220 directory into this case. You'll go UP the file names, not down. There's enough disk space."

Even encapsulated in his cloud of terror, Brandon recognized what this would mean, and wondered how the hell Peter knew so much about them. A small candle flame of hope sprang into being, however: while he was out of the room he might be able to _do_ something. Raise the alarm, maybe. He made as if to leave, but Peter held him back.

"Face me, and keep still."

He carefully unwrapped the micro camera threaded it through one of the boy's lab coat's buttonholes.

"I'll be able to see and hear everything you see and hear," he said, holding up the remote viewer for Brandon's benefit. Brandon saw an image of Peter holding the viewer, and other images disappearing into infinity therein. He heard Peter's voice coming from two sources, one slightly delayed. The candle flame inside him went out. "If you tip anybody off, or don't copy the right files…"

Brandon didn't need that sentence finished.

"The case is shielded against EMPs, so you can't wipe it out. The drives are solid state, so there's no point bashing them around. I wouldn't open the case either. Come straight back when you're done."

Every possible avenue of escape had been snuffed out before he could even consider them. He resigned himself to his task, taking the case and exiting the room.

* * *

Walternate was quietly furious. Peter had waltzed in here, killed three men, and was now ordering _his _people about like dogs. The ticking nuclear bomb was barely registering. Even as Peter had been plugging holes, he had been looking for new ones, but the strategy he kept being drawn back to was simply to allow Peter to take the girl out of her cell and then come down on her like a bag of hammers. On his own, Peter could strut and pontificate all he liked, but having her as a variable would cut through his projected air of abandon in short order. Brandon was a lost cause now, but he could be forgiven – he was very young and had no experience in such matters as these – so he did not protest when the boy left to do Peter's bidding.

Peter approached him, and now they would get down to the nitty gritty. He had sent Brandon off on his own because he didn't know _everything_ about this base; likely, he knew everything Dunham knew, and that wasn't _everything_ by any means. His son squatted in front of him, both his weapons now stowed on his person. He honestly didn't think he would need them any more; Walternate hoped this carelessness would last. Peter propped the remote viewer up on the platform between them. Walternate heard footsteps and the odd door opening − Brandon was on his way to the server room.

"Now… where is she?"

Peter's eyes came up and met his properly for the first time, and in that instant, all of Walternate's notions of having any control of this situation evaporated like water thrown onto a hot iron, and he gave over all hope of anything except living beyond the next hour and three quarters.


	4. Abyss

_[A/N - almost an interlude, really :)]_

The Secretary had few maxims – life had taught him that almost nothing was immutable – but if told "the most dangerous enemy is the man with nothing to lose", he would have agreed completely.

He had never met such an enemy. The loss of his son, all those years ago, had muted and dimmed his own capacity for emotion − save for a gnawing, reptilian desire for revenge − but had also, strangely, made him commensurately more perceptive to the emotions (which, in most cases, equated to _vulnerabilities_) of others. No matter how vehement or implacable the opponent, he had always been able to find something, some loose floorboard that he could pry up, often with courtier's kiss delicacy, until the underlying Achilles Heel could be exposed and exploited. He was almost always disappointed by what he found – these weaknesses were usually insipid and saccharine, attachments to power, to money, to other people. He could have used his skill to become President if he had so wished, but the post of Secretary of Defence better suited his goals. _Goal_. He had an effective _carte blanche_, ostensibly to defend the Earth and universe, but in reality was using it only to punish his counterpart. He had an army of trained killers convinced that they were under attack from monstrously distorted versions of themselves; the truth, of which he alone was aware, was that the first and only shot fired from their side had been completely accidental: a grief-stricken father had saved his boy's life.

He had never failed in this kind of manipulation, so had never before seen what was – or, more accurately, what _wasn't − _ behind his son's eyes, and the sight froze his blood. Here, finally, was an enemy with nothing to lose.

He had been expecting some emotion. Wild, indiscriminate rage at being duped; searing, laser-beam rage at _him_ for being the duper; gloating, childish triumph at being about to exact his vengeance. Any of these he could have worked with, any of them he could have molded and reshaped to divert or confuse the boy. Emotions coloured perception, clouded judgment. Unfortunately, Peter's eyes were windows into something Walternate had hoped never, ever to see: a yawning, windblown abyss of storm-grey nothingness. It was the absolute and total distillation of _nothing_ _to_ _lose_, and the knowledge that he, Walternate, would be unable to do anything but sit back and watch what was about to unfold crashed over him in an ice-cold wave. He was used to power; for the next hour he would as powerless as a rabbit in the path of a brushfire.

Even as he had searched his son's face for that crack he could wedge open, he had been assessing and calculating with furious speed. He had been almost certain that Peter was gambling on his importance to the Weapon making him untouchable, and it would have been a very astute bet − he would have waited a long time before calling it. But there were limits. Besides, Peter was here now, and he could be kept here. He could have the girl, too, if he wanted her (and he very apparently _did_) to pass the time. He felt a mild, almost amused gladness that he hadn't had her terminated yet: her resurfacing personality was extremely trying, and she was rapidly reaching the end of her usefulness. All this talk of unstoppable countdowns and exploding bracelets had to be lies. _Didn't_ _it_?

Now, though, having seen into that dismal, infinite void behind his son's eyes, he realized that Peter had gone over the edge of some monumental precipice, and his already half-formed plans had collapsed like a house of cards. There would be no reasoning with this Peter − it would have been like trying to reason with an oncoming train. No dialogue, no threats, no ultimatums - none of his arsenal would have the slightest effect. This was barely even Peter… barely even _human_. It may as well have been some sort of avatar, a puppet, controlled like a video game character, whose human master had no stake beyond the annoyance of having to start this level again. He recognized much of himself in this Peter, from whom something had also been taken. There would have been denial, anger, thrashing, impotent frustration at first. But then it would all have boiled away, leaving a residue of corrosive, poisonous vengeance. However, Walternate could see that not only had all this happened to Peter over not years but possibly _days_, Peter had gone further, right to the boundary of sanity: even the desire for revenge had disappeared. The fact that he was about to blow up a government building was incidental to him. He had come for the girl, and the building and all its occupants were mere collateral.

He had caught the glint in his son's eye when Dunham's name had been mentioned last year, as they sat in his office, and based solely on this he had very rapidly woven his plan to make the switch. He had thought Peter's feelings went no deeper than the casual. Now, though, he realized just how badly he had underestimated them – his utter lack of empathy, for the first time, had come back and bitten him: this girl had driven him to abandon _everything_, including self preservation, which the Secretary still held in abundance. That, he admitted grudgingly to himself, was why Peter would win this.

This Peter would kill anything and everything that got in his way − he had already killed three perfect strangers in the few minutes since his arrival – seeing not enemies, not _people_, but mere objects. Obstacles. _Props_. Coupled with this new and terrifying disregard was the most frightening (to the Secretary) thing of all: Peter was not playing his "Weapon card" at all, having probably forgotten that it even existed: at the moment, he placed his own life no more highly than those through whom he was prepared to cut a swathe to accomplish his goal. He had left himself outside this battle. He was even gambling his beloved's life against those of the several hundred who worked in the base, and _this_ bet would only be called by an utter madman, which Walternate, unlike his opposite number, was not.

Seeing that second bracelet clipped to Peter's belt, that cheeky "phewf!" feeling at having kept the other Dunham alive exploded into a crushing, stabbing panic that sent his heart crashing around in his ribcage before almost stopping it. Had Peter arrived here and found his Olivia dead, they would likely all be no more than ashes by now, and not merely thanks to vengeance: Peter would have had no reason to go home…

* * *

He calmed himself before speaking, determined not to tip his hand. While Peter would get what he wanted and walk away scot free, there were still things to learn until then. All knowlegde was power.

"She's in a cell."

"Why a cell?" Completely devoid of any feeling. He might have been asking for the _time_.

"Her original personality has… reasserted itself. We couldn't leave her in the field."

"You kept her alive to try and find out how she can cross over." Not a question, so he didn't answer. He had been on the razor's edge of finishing the whole thing this morning.

"Peter, she's half one woman and half another. If you want her back, we're your only chance."

It was a very, _very_ risky play, and Walternate half expected to be shot in the head for even trying it − it smacked of desperation, and begged to be called. To his astonishment, though, Peter asked mildly

"What was it that tipped her over? I'm betting it was that tank." He looked over his shoulder to indicate it. How, in God's name, had he known that? The confusion must have shown, despite his attempt to conceal it, because Peter… laughed would have been the wrong word. He had heard no human mouth make a sound like that.

"We have one of our own. Guess what we use it for."

Had it not been such an obvious admission of failure, he would have put his head in his hands. Putting the girl in the tank had been absolutely the worst thing they could have done…

* * *

Walternate's lamentations were interrupted by Brandon's return. Peter had been glancing on and off at his little monitor since the boy had departed, and the fact that they were all still alive suggested that he had completed Peter's tasks to his, Peter's, satisfaction.

"Lock the door behind you, Brandon." He did, and carried the case to the table with the telephone on it. His face had betrayed his sense of violation at having these secrets stolen. Peter disregarded this, instead removing Walternate's handcuffs and using them to secure the case to his own right wrist – it had no connection to the bomb, and could still be stolen before the end of the game. Brandon backed away, being very careful not to go too near the nuke.

"OK, one down. Mr Secretary, you're going to have your helicopter ready to fly upstate in twenty minutes." It would take a good half an hour to evacuate everybody from the base, and another half hour to establish a one-mile perimeter. He would allow them to begin the evacuation once they were in the air. Not before. The Secretary rose to his feet, his posture not its usual upright, "do as I say" dominance.

"Why not take one of the autopilot models?" Peter almost chuckled – the man never let up!

"Because I've no guarantee some nimrod wouldn't override the autopilot and fly me into a mountain once the base is empty. Besides, you're going with me."

"Why?" Facile, making him jump through hoops. It was blindingly obvious.

"We won't be shot down with you on board."

"What makes you so sure of _that_?" Broyles had spoken for the first time, and Peter sensed Walternate curse inwardly. This was provocation, pure and simple, and provoking such a man as this was tantamount to kicking an unexploded mine. Peter's reply, though, was almost flippant.

"The Secretary here is such an amoral, self-serving coward I doubt he'd give up his life for _anything_."

The words were insulting, but the tone was not. Again, Peter was merely stating what he saw to be a fact. Broyles, cowed by this, remained silent. He seemed to have implicitly agreed.

"OK, enough of the chit-chat. Time to go."

* * *

He had Brandon uncuff Broyles, walked them both into the middle of the room, and shot both of them with the tranquilizer, each in the thigh. They would wake up safe, or not at all. He dragged them, one at a time, to the door, then went around the bench to front of the bomb. Very, very slowly, with both eyes locked on the accelerometers and inclinometers, he turned it so it faced away from the door. There would be a fifteen-second delay after the activation of the proximity sensor, and while Broyles and Brandon would not be awake to cross into its path, whoever came in there to free them while the place would be. It would grind the Secretary's gears to have to tell whoever went in here to leave the bomb alone, and Peter was looking forward to hearing and seeing it.

He conducted the man over to the phone, removing the handset and activating speakerphone.

"OK, you're on: chopper ready in twenty minutes."

Walternate pressed 1, and an internal dial tone responded. After a few moments, a pleasant female voice issued from the speaker.

"Lucy – how can I help you?"

"Ah, Lucy dear. Could you tell Major MacIntyre to have the helicopter ready for a wheels-up in twenty minutes? I'll be going upstate."

"Of course, Sir."

"Thank you."

"Bravo," Peter muttered, and yanked the phone cord out of the wall, ripping the plug away. There had been no room for any coded messages in that interplay, so he gestured for Walternate to go to the door. Peter unlocked it, stepping aside to let Walternate out first, and then followed, sparing the bomb one last look – the timer had read **1:27:03** when he had turned the proximity sensor on. He locked the door behind him – the room would continue to be off-limits until the Secretary stated otherwise.

He had half-expected to be accosted the instant he stepped outside. He could not allow Walternate to speak to the base on the PA and alert them not to harm him, as they could construe it as an excuse to evacuate. He had left both his Glocks behind, carrying only the tranquilizer, which he had concealed almost completely in the front of his pants and pulled the bottom of his vest over – the sight of the pistols could have incited a "shoot first" mentality in any agents they ran into, and that would be the end of him. And them, though they wouldn't know it. Thus, he went apparently unarmed, sure that Walternate would carve a path for him with no more than words. They could have been guest and host.

"OK, where to? Clock's ticking…"

Instead of answering, Walternate led the way. Peter followed. They passed into cold, sparse, echoic corridors. The word _dungeon_ rose unbidden into Peter's mind.


	5. Him

The shutter rose, revealing Walternate. Olivia's fear retreated: Walternate wouldn't lower himself to killing her himself. Indeed, he probably wouldn't be _present_ for it – despite his projected air of no-nonsense toughness, he was, at heart, a coward. She was safe this time. Unfortunately, it could only mean more tests. The dozen needle marks in her left arm, and the three in her spine, lit up, as though cigarettes were being pressed into them. They had determined that she had been given a drug, some drug, and had so far taken what she believed to be at least twice her compliment of blood, bit by bit, in an attempt to identify it. The tests were painful and, worse, humiliating. Her humanity was never acknowledged in the slightest; she was little more than ambulatory meat.

It had all gone wrong for them when they had put her in their Tank. They had intended it to relax her, make her more pliable, and unlock her access to her crossing-over ability. Instead, it had yanked off the heavy black cloth that had been draped over her _real_ self. Memories, _thousands_ of them, had come screaming back in, and her head had almost split open but, incredibly, her mind had managed to defend itself.

* * *

She had opened her eyes, under Brandon's instruction, and found herself in a strange, old-fashioned laboratory. The furniture was _wooden_. There were shelves of chemicals of every possible colour. A blackboard was almost completely covered in meaningless doodles. There was a cow penned in a corner of the room. A _cow_? If the cow were discounted, she was apparently alone.

"Where are you, Agent Dunham?"

Brandon's soft voice seemed to be coming from everywhere, from the very air itself. She opened her mouth, having no idea what she was about to say – this place made no sense at _all_ – but another voice spoke up from behind her and stopped her. A _close_ voice. A _there_ voice.

"Yes, Olivia – where _are_ you?"

Him. She spun around, her blonde

(_blonde_?)

hair whipping, and saw him, standing there in exactly the same clothes she had been shown before getting into this thing. Her mouth fell partway open again – she had lost all control of her face. She made as if to speak to him, but he stopped her again.

"No need to talk out loud," he said, rolling his eyes upward to remind her that people were listening. She closed her mouth, and thought to him instead.

"_Peter? What's happening?__ What is this place?_"

Peter chuckled, and she felt a wave of warmth rise up from her toes.

"What's happening is they've screwed up . _Royally_." He could barely contain his amusement.

"Agent Dunham?" Brandon again.

"I'd think of a good lie," Peter managed to say through his chortling. She spoke out loud this time.

"I'm… in a house, I think. One I've never seen before."

Peter's eyebrows rose. _Good one_.

"Good. Do you see anything… unusual? Anything out of place?"

"No, not in this room."

"OK. Leave that room and have a look around."

"OK."

Sensing she wouldn't be bothered for a while, she returned her attention to Peter.

"_What do you mean, they've screwed up?"_

In response, he moved towards her, and her heart picked up speed, but he continued past and she turn to follow him. He stopped in front of… a dynamite charge went off behind her eyes. Of course – she had been in the thing _dozens _of times. Peter's musical laugh rose again, making her smile, as his hand caressed the Tank's brutal steel in fondness. If she had been home in this state, _her_ Walter would have done exactly the same. _Her_ Walter. The lab suddenly became as familiar as it had previously been strange.

"_Peter… I think I'm... ME again!"_ He turned and reached up, over her shoulder, lifting a few strands of her hair up for her to see. His thumb and fingers played with it.

"You are in _here_, yes, and if you don't let on, they'll spend the next few days unraveling all that work they did when they brought you here."

She could contain herself no longer, dashing forward and almost knocking him over before her arms clamped around his middle. She heaved a breath in through her nose, right to the bottom of her lungs, pulling his scent down into her very core. His chest was still bouncing with gentle laughter, and his own arms rose in reply, one hand in the middle of her back, the other stroking her hair. A loud MOOOO! from behind them made her jump, and she laughed joyously.

"Agent Dunham? What do you see?"

Brandon's voice came down like a sledgehammer onto a glass paperweight, shattering the mood. Peter's arms released her, and he backed away. His face had taken on a darkly significant pensiveness. His eyes bored straight into, straight _through,_ her own. He spoke urgently.

"Olivia, much as I'd like to lie to you, I can't: it's going to get tough from here on in."

"_What do you mean? Are you going away?"_

"I hope not, but that's up to you. You and she are going to be fighting it out from now own. The Tank has let you out of their cage, but it's you who's got to win this thing. I'll help you if I can – if _she_ can't stop you, that is."

Something was happening: the air in the lab seemed to become... _visible_, somehow, and began to emit an off-white glow. She knew the experiment was about to end. She felt a crooked finger tilt her chin up. Those stormy blue eyes found hers again; they pierced right through the thickening mist-light as if it wasn't there.

"Listen to me. No matter what they say or do to you, _remember_…"

His lips crashed into hers. She flung her hands up, desperate to seize his face and draw him all the way to her, but they passed right through his head. Where his head had just been. She opened her eyes, and caught the briefest glimpse of a featureless, opaque white fog, before all light departed.

The lid opened, exposing a stripe of cold white light, which widened until Brandon's face appeared above her. _No, not Brandon_, her mind threw up from nowhere.

"Are you alright? You weren't answering for a good five minutes."

"Were you speaking? I couldn't hear you."

He reached into the tank and took her arm, pulling her into a sitting position. She clambered out, accepting his proffered towel.

"So – what about the house? See anything of interest?"

She was about to make a terrible mistake and ask _what house?_, when she glanced to her right and saw a pile of burning clothes. Very luckily, Brandon had turned away from her, so he didn't see her mouth fall open in shock. It had closed again before he was facing her, and she had realized to whom the clothes had belonged. And that they weren't _burning_ at all.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, her mind had been plagued by a strange and ominous image: a set of old-fashioned brass scales, dipping and swaying gently, first one way, then the other. She would answer a phone call from Frank, a smile trying to pull the corners of her mouth off the top of her head, and not three hours later, fall asleep with a fully-clothed Peter's arm around her shoulder. Each felt as true, as _right_ as the other. She would walk past a mirror, see herself, and her hand would be halfway to her weapon. That sheet of red hair, which she saw each and every day, seemed to have nudged something deep within her psyche – a rotting tooth that she couldn't pull out.

Ever so gradually, the scales had begun to lean one way, and one way only. She started to feel a gnawing… _wrongness_ at being with Charlie every day, and every Tank experiment intensified it. She began to look forward to going into the Tank, despite that fact that no progress was being made. She associated it with a warmth that had nothing to do with the water. An _inner_ warmth…

Work began to grow more difficult. Protocols seemed much… _tighter_ than usual, more superfluous. Her surroundings were becoming more and more alien. Her conversations with her colleagues took significant effort and powers of recall. She had been in the van one morning, on her way to a crime scene, and had come within a hair's breadth of asking Charlie what he had just injected himself with. Her mouth hadn't opened, but her jaw muscles had definitely been primed. She knew then that it was only a matter of time: she had established control, but was now a stranger in a strange land.

It had all unraveled the morning she forgot how to log into her workstation. Despite the utter mundanity of it, she simply couldn't remember what to do, and there had been absolutely no way to cover it – the desk's seemingly sourceless display and configuration had made her feel like a caveman presented with a DVD player Charlie's face had clouded, and he had exchanged a darkly significant look with Lincoln. She knew then that she wouldn't leave this building again, and that if she resisted they would kill her. She had allowed herself to be taken, and recognized the old cell. _Her_ old cell.

After that, all pretence had been abandonned. At irregular intervals, and often with no warning, she would be conducted from her cell, sedated (though not even _close_ to enough) and every inch of her would be subjected to the worst possible degradation. They hadn't told her what they were after. They hadn't _needed_ to. Where the Tank had failed - _abysmally_ - this would succeed: they wanted the secret to her ability to cross.

* * *

Shoving her recollections aside, she took in Walternate's expression behind that thick glass, and was dismayed to find she couldn't read it. His visits, despite being infrequent, were always marked by very well masked anticipation at would the next round of "tests" would bring; this face, though, revealed nothing. She drew her knees up and faced the door. It opened.

For a moment she simply could not comprehend what she was seeing. It was, literally, something out of a dream. Standing just behind and to Walternate's right was Peter, wearing only his white vest, with some kind of gadget clamped around his right bicep. A metallic briefcase was handcuffed to his right hand. Of all her hallucinations (and there had been _many_), this was by some margin the most bizarre. Walternate stepped aside, and dream-Peter came forward. No doubt he was here to _rescue_ her. How thrilling! She was about to unfold her legs and try to go back to sleep when, belatedly, she realized what she had just seen.

_Walternate had stepped aside_.

_WALTERNATE HAD STEPPED ASIDE._

She felt her mouth unhinge and drop slightly open; her eyeballs tried to leap out of her face.

_**He's here**__._

Despite his being a good six feet away from her, she felt herself pulled, _yanked_ off the bed, like a paperclip launching itself toward a junkyard magnet, when she stopped, and almost overbalanced. Peter was pointing a gun at her, his face as flat as a glass of water.

Of all the things he would have to do tonight, this would be, he knew, the hardest. He stepped out from behind Walternate and saw her, for the first time in five months, and felt such an explosion of love and pity and sorrow that it threatened to stop his heart. It took every shred of self control not to simply storm into the room and pull her into a rib-cracking embrace. Her hair was halfway back to being blond, looking like a colouring experiment that had been abandoned before completion. She was dressed in a duck-egg blue medical gown, and he noticed injection sores in the creases of both arms, all aligned along the prominent veins. There was a flaring sheet of anger. This was rapidly spinning out of control.

Her saw her muscles tense – she was getting ready to leap at him – and, somehow, he remembered what was left to do: he drew the tranquilizer pistol. She stopped, her foot sliding slightly as she nearly overbalanced. He had, against every expectation, retained control, and it was a good job his back was to Walternate – he had almost, _almost_, slipped. She opened her mouth, and he knew he couldn't let her speak, or he would crumple.

"Pe…"

"When's Ella's birthday?"

* * *

The question didn't register at first. In fact, she barely heard it – the sight of Peter pointing a gun at her was still making its way through her senses. She looked more closely at the weapon, and noticed it was merely a tranquilizer pistol. Her panic did not disappear completely, but at least settled to a moderate simmer. He was _maddeningly_ close, she could reach out and _touch_ him, if he would only let her.

"When's Ella's birthday?"

He asked it more gently, in deference to her confusion, and she opened her mouth to answer it, but the reply turned to smoke on her tongue. While trying to say "April eighteenth," she had simultaneously tried to ask "who's Ella?" The reason for the tranquilizer now became obvious: he had no way of knowing which Olivia she was. In truth, though her counterpart's essence was almost under control, she didn't know herself…

"Olivia: _when's Ella's birthday?"_

She sensed that this would be the last time she would be asked, and his mention of her name managed to strangle her alternate and allow the answer to flow out.

"April eighteenth."

After what seemed to her a very long and weighing pause, the pistol was slowly lowered, and returned to the waistband of his pants. He pulled his vest over the grip to conceal it.

* * *

Walternate watched the exchange with his senses cranked up their highest possible resolution. Even wallowing in the frustration of surrender, he realized he had cherished a kernel of hope, and now he allowed it to flourish. He knew that it would be now, if ever, that Peter's nihilistic disregard would disappear. He saw the girl try to rise off her bed, and silently prayed. There would be some cloying display of emotion, and the game would be over. He would summon a swarm of troops, have his base evacuated, and stand with his foot on the girl's throat while Peter was encased in amber, his suicide bomb rendered useless, until they could figure out what to do with him. He felt his insides coil up, like some colossal organic clock spring, until he had thought they would implode. Though his base would be lost, his Weapon's spark plug _and_ his ticket to _ad lib_ crossings would be in the palm of his hand. It would be a _victory_!

A soon as he saw the girl freeze in her tracks, and Peter's left arm rise into that casual pointing attitude, the spring unwound. Completely. _Explosively_. He almost _heard_ its skittering as it tried to leap off its axis in its eagerness for release. His glorious plan, and its all attendant triumph, turned to dust and crumbled before his eyes. Again, he realized, he had underestimated Peter, and now it had happened twice in one day. In one _hour_, for God's sake. Belatedly, he noticed Peter take in the girl's injection marks, and the vacuum was very rapidly filled with scorching terror – he imagined Peter turning around and putting a dart in his eye…

* * *

Satisfied that he had regained control of himself, Peter summoned Olivia to him. He kept his face completely neutral. Somehow.

"Let me see your arm. Left arm."

Her expression was a picture of hurt bewilderment, but he had to ignore it for now. She approached him, her face beseeching him for some sign of recognition. He looked her in the eye as little as possible, but felt a blast of almost insurmountable longing as his hand swung her arm up the horizontal.

"Keep it there for me." How his voice hadn't descended into cracked half-sobs he had no idea. He reached down with his left hand and unclipped the second bracelet from his belt.

* * *

"You'll have to help me out here," he said, his voice still flat; the metal case was still dangling from his right arm. She took his meaning, and helped him tie the ratchet; their fingers touched briefly, and she very nearly dropped dead at the contact. She felt him tighten the… whatever it was, and he pressed a sequence of buttons on its woven metal surface. A large set of red digital numerals burst into being, and the bracelet began to emit a pleasant, though hurried, train of beeps. It took a moment for her to realize that it was her own heart she was hearing, and another moment to realize that, while Peter's bracelet's numerals matched her own, his device was silent. She peered at the numbers, slow to recognize what they represented: it was a countdown. The thing looked a lot like a high-end iPod, complete with an overpriced strap.

"OK, it's done." His tone was quiet, conspiratorial, only for her ears. "There's a very large bomb downstairs, and if you or I are killed or knocked out, these things will set it off. We're leaving."

_Bomb_? That single question set off a whole _avalanche_ of them. How he had gotten here? Had anyone come with him? How long had she been gone? What was in the case? Drowning all of these out, though, was the one question she would have had difficulty putting into words:

_What's happened to you? You're so _cold…

She forced herself to make the leap: this was not the Peter she had been seeing for the past few months, the one who had comforted and encouraged her so much. She hadn't seen _this _Peter since he went inside the theater, and she had remained outside to cover him and his father.

* * *

Peter turned to face Walternate. They were on the home stretch. He corrected himself: the _penultimate_ stretch. Incredibly, they had encountered not a single troop nor office worker between the lab and here. Peter had deliberately opted for a night-time insertion because the base would be at its quietest, its least prepared, but he was still amazed and grateful to have been so lucky thus far. Since they were now about to leave the base, he knew beyond doubt that something would go down before they were in that helicopter.

Walternate's face, just for a moment, had carried something that looked an awful lot like fear, but it was wiped away like condensation from a cold window before he could be sure.

"Almost there, sir. Once we're in the air you can call for the evacuation. Quicker we get there, quicker your people will be safe."

What flashed onto Walternate's face this time was so blatant that Peter had a bizarre urge to laugh: it looked for all the world like he had only just restrained himself from saying "Oh, really? _Thank_ you, kind sir! Would you mind awfully if I licked your boots as well?" What kind of man _was_ this? There were perhaps a hundred lives depending on him, and all he could think about was having his precious _power_ negated for a paltry couple of hours? Such a man having such vast resources at his command was an unbelievably dangerous situation – at his core, he was little more than a selfish child whose favourite toy had been confiscated.

* * *

He inclined his head, indicating that Walternate should lead the way to the elevator. Peter stood aside, allowing Olivia to precede him. She tried to catch his eyes, but failed. Desperate as she was for some sort of reunion, she knew full well that they were in the midst of a very delicate and volatile situation, and that Walternate would be putting all his efforts into probing for weaknesses, ready to pounce at the slightest wobble. She drew silent comfort from Peter's presence behind her as they walked down the corridor, the glinting elevator doors drawing closer. He had been the weapon with which she had fought her alternate inside her own mind; Altivia had nothing to which she was attached to the same degree. Yes, _she_ loved Frank, and her mother, but that paled utterly in comparison. Peter was _part_ of her − he had said so himself (or, rather, _she_ had said so _her_self – he had been nothing but a figment of her imagination at the time).

* * *

They reached the doors, still having encountered nobody at all. Peter knew, however, that once these doors closed, then opened again, that would all change. He had no weapons now, save the metaphorical knife he had to Walternate's throat. Peter called the elevator, and within ten seconds it arrived. Apparently it was very quiet in the building tonight; the attendant PING! seemed awfully loud, its echo rolling away down the corridor. Peter gestured Walternate in first, followed, and then beckoned Olivia to join them. He pressed G – it was the uppermost of six buttons – and the doors closed. The motor ground into life.

He felt her eyes crawling over his face and silently begged her not to break character. The were standing side by side, behind Walternate's back, and her right hand was less than three inches from his left. He could have bridged the gap, and all but crush her bones to powder with the intensity of his grip, all without the Secretary seeing, but it was a very slippery slope. It would leave an indelible mark on his face, in his very skin, into which Walternate would drive a merciless spike. He closed his eyes and moderated his breathing. He could almost hear Walternate's brain whirring and clanking, the sound of a malfunctioning cartoon robot. He was _still_ analyzing. Probing. Waiting. The elevator's cold, harsh light made her look deathly pale, and her cheeks were slightly hollowed. Walternate's prone back suddenly seemd very, _very_ tempting... Peter's hand had drifted down to his waist, and he had to physically halt its approach to the tranquilizer - coming through these doors before him would be as good as suicide.

In yet another gratuitous helping of luck, the elevator didn't stop on its way to the ground floor. From this here on out, though, luck would play no part. Once these doors opened, it would be him against his father – the fate of the entire base, its people, and this operation would boil down to a battle of Bishop wills. The elevator slowed, slowed, and stopped, with the merest jerk. An age seemed to pass, and the doors parted, as smoothly and silently as a wet bar of soap gliding across a pane of ice.


	6. Flight

It was nowhere near as bad as it could have been. The doors opened to reveal a short corridor, wide and spacious, lit by absurdly cozy yellowish lamps every half-dozen yards on each wall. Peter looked down and saw a black floor, shot through with flecks of silver, polished to a high shine. Granite, he suspected. Lifting his eyes, he saw what was at the end of the corridor, roughly thirty feet ahead: the glass door that heralded the way out. He could make out a gently-falling sheet of raindrops, a wide beam of which were lit against the black night sky by a clean, blue-white glow – the helicopter's running lights. Absurdly, he wished he had dressed more appropriately, and then remembered Olivia was wearing basically nothing. He felt a nauseating shove of almost painful longing. _Stay cool_.

To that end, his eyes landed on the people populating the corridor. Six of them. He had realized by now that he had probably overestimated the number of people that were in the base at this time of night – he and Walternate had passed through the deepest, most secure bowels of the place and come across no-one − but it was obvious to Peter now that numbers didn't matter to the Secretary; his response would have been the same had there been ten people in here or ten _thousand_.

The six in the corridor could only be night-shift agents – they were all armed, with those same space-age weapons one of which he had taken from Broyles. Their attitude was casual – they were loosely agglomerated around the coffee machine near the front door, talking of mundane matters. Complaining, it sounded like. Apparently even night shifts in the DoD headquarters were tedious.

He tilted forward, speaking very quietly into Walternate's ear.

"Look at them, Mr Secretary. They can still be punished for your mistakes. So can all the others."

* * *

Walternate managed a very convincing display of grave consideration, but inside he was fuming: he would throw most of these people to the lions if it suited him – very few of them couldn't be replaced. Unless, and until, he saw Peter's resolve crack, he would obey simply to save his _own_ life. He felt a gentle push on his shoulder blade, and left the elevator, sensing the girl and Peter following him.

Having his authority bucked in private, among people he had taken into his confidence, was one thing, but these were _minions_. He was gradually being seized by a gnawing certainty that _something_ was going to happen before they reached that door: at some point within the next sixty seconds he would have to defer, capitulate, _surrender_ to Peter's will and grant them safe passage, and do it in _public_. The knowledge was _grinding_.

* * *

Olivia's Peter-induced shock was beginning to dissipate, being replaced by a gnawing fear. As they walked out of the elevator and into the corridor, she took in each face at the far end and realized that, via her alternate, she knew all of them. They had gone not ten feet from the elevator when the gang at the coffee machine dropped their conversation like a live grenade and turned, as one, to observe their passage. Their faces carried dictionary definitions of utter bewilderment. She could empathize: they were seeing the Secretary of Defence leading his long-ago-kidnapped son, wearing a vest, with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and a disheveled, thought-to-be-psychotic Agent Dunham clad only in a hospital gown, her hair halfway between colours.

As if from the bottom of a very deep well, one whose water's surface was too far down to be glimpsed, a recollection emerged: she had escaped from this place before. However, nothing of their passage upon leaving the cell rang familiar with that escape; she had gone a different way: a "back" way. It had been almost too easy. This corridor had played no part. It was as familiar as if she walked down it every day, and yet she had never seen it before in her life.

_I should have told him – we'd have been out by now…_

_**Yes, you should! Sorry if I kept that one back. Oh well, at least we'll see if he's got the balls to carry this off…**_

She hadn't heard that voice for days. A taunting, goading voice, barely audible. Her alternate's voice, seeping out of her mental cage like smoke through loosely woven cloth. Olivia paid it no heed – that was exactly what _she_ wanted – but the resurgence of this voice, and the fact that her memory of escaping had been withheld, worried her. She walked on.

Incredibly, the gawkers did nothing but gawk. Absolutely nothing. Their heads revolved, as though pulled by magnets, to follow their bizarre party's passage, but they were neither accosted nor addressed. However, her mind supplied each swiveling neck with squeal of a hinge. Silence billowed; the only sounds remaining were those of Peter's and Walternate's shoes clopping on the stone floor. She was wearing slippers – her own feet made no sound at all. The corridor seemed to swell and stretch, and she could have heard a pin drop anywhere therein. She hesitated, her shuffling stride slowing, when she felt a hand on the small of her back, as gently as a silk cloth falling onto a priceless vase. Peter's hand. She turned to her left. He wasn't looking at her, his focus on the doors up ahead and drawing ever closer, but the touch conveyed everything she needed. She fell into step beside him.

* * *

Walternate's tension stretched with every step until he felt the last of the slack disappear. He was a piano wire being pulled apart by trucks, their engines bellowing in effort. They were halfway to the doors, and still nothing had happened. He found himself splitting in two: most of him wanted to slide out of this thing cleanly, but another part wanted every alarm in the place to go off right this second. He could now make out the helicopter's chopping whoosh. It was idling, ready to take them away. Ten more feet…

No sooner had the thought entered his mind than an overly-loud sound issued from behind them, and it all went to hell. He had a heart-stopping vision of Peter's left hand rising to that damned bracelet and lighting the place up with holy fire.

* * *

Peter turned. The elevator's ping, while twenty feet away, had sounded like it had gone off inside his head. The doors parted, revealing two men. They were deep in conversation, and one of them was laughing raucously. They came out of the elevator side by side. As if in a dream, Peter realized that one of them was Charlie Francis; the other he had glimpsed in Altivia's mind. He didn't know his name, but his face was different than she remembered; he had been badly burned when they had last spoken, but had obviously recovered very well indeed. Both men were armed, and as the corridor's utter silence penetrated their mirth and their eyes finally took in what they were seeing, he knew that the touch paper had been lit.

It could have sent him over the edge of panic, but he could _feel_ the Secretary's belligerent probing over his shoulder. This was the final link in the chain of escape, and the last time Walternate would be able to drop the blade − he would be drinking the scene in like a man dying of thirst bent over a water trough. Peter retreated to the very bottom of his psyche, determined to give him nothing. Even as the two agents' faces collapsed in total, thunderstruck confusion, he arranged his own into a study of almost boredneutrality. He forced his muscles to relax – he had been within a paper's thickness of automatically stepping in front of Olivia, and Walternate would have eaten that up like chocolate. With almost complete detachment, _almost_, he noted that Olivia had neither stepped in front of him nor behind him − either action would have tipped their hand. _Good girl_, he thought, with a rush of loving pride: even battered and violated, her incredible strength made a mockery of their enemies.

* * *

"_FREEZE_!"

Christ almighty! Francis' shout almost _deafened_ him! Here they came, him leading, Lee following, storming towards them as if this was some bloody TV cop show. They spread slightly apart, arranging their lines of fire into a right-angled V, one weapon pointed at Peter, one at the girl. Taking this as their cue, the knot of people behind them exploded like a firecracker full of ball bearings, and they _all_ drew their weapons, surrounding Walternate and his companions. He stepped between Peter and the girl, moving to address Francis and Lee, knowing that the others would follow their example, but on his way past he took the deftest possible glance, out of the very corner of his eye, at Peter's face. He was confounded yet again. Not only hadn't Peter made some gallant attempt to protect the girl, he looked supremely disinterested. _Annoyed_, almost, as if this were no more than a flat tyre he would have to change. Walternate had been almost salivating at the thought of having eight weapons trained on her… Peter's look of crushed defeat and horror at being trumped right at the end. Instead, with mounting fury, he spoke to his agents.

"Stand down."

Francis' face folded into a frown. He and Lee had blown the whistle on the girl's duplicity, and they knew she had been kept in confinement ever since. They had deduced that she was extremely dangerous, unaware that her memories had been overwritten against her will; to them, she was an enemy agent who had replaced one of their own by guile and deceit. Francis and Lee exchanged a look, then, incredibly, both looked at Peter.

Walternate simply could not comprehend what he was seeing. He had given two of his people an order, and here they were gawping at his captor. All the while that maddening countdown was still ticking away. He guessed they had roughly an hour now, but he wouldn't lower himself to turning around and looking at one of their bracelets. Instead, he raised his voice to a shout, again aimed at Francis and Lee, but it detonated through the deathly-silent lobby and reached all of them with same explosive power.

"STAND DOWN! _ALL_ OF YOU!"

His authority alone should be enough, would _have_ to be – he couldn't risk telling them about the bomb, unsure how they would react. _I _should_ be sure how they react_, he thought petulantly, _they're MINE_. With a completely inappropriate sense of relief – _relief_! at his own people's _obedience_! − he saw Francis and Lee lower their weapons, and sensed the rest of the agents doing the same. Their faces were still puzzled. Cowed, but puzzled. He maintained a searing glare at the two in front of him until the weapons were holstered.

* * *

While Peter's face had remained totally immobile, his heart had been crashing around his ribcage like an errant pinball. He knew that if any trace of weaponry had been evident on his person, they would have shot him, not stopping to wonder about his and Olivia's matching arm-wear. He would be dead; they would _all_ be dead. _She_ would be dead. He was mightily relieved at having thought not to add an audible pulse monitor to his own bracelet; Olivia's could bleep all it wanted. He turned, with supreme nonchalance, disregarding the eight armed men surrounding him, and closed the last ten feet to the exit. The vista beyond the glass door was completely consumed by a large grey-blue helicopter that had been parked on the lawn a few yards away, the trees swaying slightly in the rotor's breeze. As he opened the door, its sound trebled in intensity, going from a dull subliminal thrum to a whooshing roar overlaid with a tattoo of blade chops. He passed out from under the awning, and the gentle rain caressed his bare shoulders. Involuntarily, he craned his face skyward, closing his eyes. The rain felt like life itself returning to him. He heard the door open again behind him, Olivia coming out ahead of Walternate. Without turning around, he made his way to the helicopter's nose, the downdraft blasting him with glowing blue raindrops. Behind him, he heard Walternate bellowing more instructions:

"The site is locked down until you hear from me or Colonel Broyles – nobody in or out!"

Without ceremony, Peter opened the pilot's door, drew his tranquilizer pistol, and aimed it at the man's eye.

"Get out."

The pilot's eyes almost crossed in his attempt to focus on the pistol's muzzle, and he lifted his hands in compliance, sliding out of his seat and standing on the grass. Peter had him spread his arms against the side of the cockpit while he frisked for weapons, finding none. Apparently he had only anticipated dropping the Secretary off at work tonight. Peter beckoned, and Walternate and Olivia crossed the lawn to join him. He opened the side door presented to the facility, and Olivia climbed in. Peter gestured for Walternate to take the front seat, next to the pilot, and moved around the nose to climb in through the opposite door.

It was unlike any helicopter he had ever been in before, and it took him a moment to identify quite what the difference was: when all the doors had been closed, the helicopter's sound had all but disappeared. There was some sort of anti-noise technology at work here – Walternate's voice was as audible as if they'd been merely eating together in a quiet restaurant.

"Need I ask where we're going?"

The question had sarcasm _dripping_ off it, like crude oil. He knew, of course, so Peter merely shook his head.

"Head for Lake Reiden," Walternate ordered.

"Yes, sir." The pilot was still shell-shocked, but had been given an instruction that would occupy him for the next half hour, and complied smoothly enough. The rotor noise rose.

Peter looked out to his right, past Olivia, through the window, and realized belatedly that he had just come out of the base of the Statue of Liberty. He had seen it from this angle in Altivia's mind – she saw it every day – but its dull-gold colour struck him with a s_ound_, a badly-made bell's discordant CLANG. This place was utterly, completely _wrong_. The Statue began to descend – the chopper was lifting off. He looked down and saw those same eight agents arranged in a ragged line outside the door, all their gazes following the chopper's ascent. _I'd look behind you_, he thought, _it won't be there much longer…_

_

* * *

_

The flight passed in silence. Olivia sat shivering in her seat, her gown having been gently wetted by rain during the walk to the helicopter. Peter's attention was, for the most part, locked on what lay beyond the chopper's windows, but for one breathless moment she thought she had caught him acknowledging her discomfort.

She looked across, with an air of simple curiosity, and Peter's armband. There were many displays – a wiggling acid-green line that seemed to denote something medical, an incremented series of bars, like those found on a cellular phone (four of the five were lit with a purplish glow), and she noticed that his own armband seemed slightly thicker than hers, as if concealing something – but the one that sucked her eyes in was the bank of red LED numerals that currently showed **0:42:54**. They had been flying for roughly twenty minutes. Noticing her attention, Peter turned to his right, seeing the countdown mirrored on her own right arm, and spoke.

"That's far enough – you can call the evacuation now."

She saw the Secretary lean forward and all but mash the co-pilot's keypad with his palm. Never had he been this animated in her presence. After a moment of silence, a female voice issued into the cockpit.

"Switchboard."

Walternate spoke, and though his voice was very, _very_ carefully modulated, she sensed a barely-submerged inferno of panic.

"This is the Secretary of Defence. Listen _very _carefully: I am declaring an emergency. Evacuate the facility NOW – EVERYONE – and everything else within one mile."

She almost heard the operator's squawk of alarm, but Walternate pressed on.

"Put me through to Major Macintyre."

"Uuuh… yes, sir."

Olivia was impressed – there was barely a pause before the internal dial-tone cut in. After a few seconds, a male voice answered, and she heard the unmistakable undertone of a warning klaxon. Whoever was on the switchboard had _already_ sounded the alarm.

"Macintyre." He sounded harried – not five seconds ago he had been told to cut and run…

"Major, I need you to go down to the basement lab before you leave; take as many men as you can spare. You'll find Colonel Broyles and one of my scientists unconscious inside. GET THEM OUT. Ignore the dead men…"

_Dead men?_

"… there's a piece of equipment in there as well, in a suitcase on one of the benches: you are NOT to go near it under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Is that clear? Just go in and get my people out."

There was silence for quite a long moment, during which Olivia absorbed what she had just heard (as, she suspected, did Macintyre):

_Dead men… equipment they're not to go near… wait, one MILE?_

Macintyre's question brought her back to the moment.

"Sir, do we have long enough to do this?" He had put two and two together with savant speed.

To her left, Peter's voice shredded the silence as effectively as a gunshot.

"Forty minutes, Major. You'll make it."

"Sir? Who was…"

"_Major, get off this god damned radio and evacuate my base RIGHT NOW!_"

To that, the only reply was a dial tone.

* * *

Twenty five minutes later Peter glimpsed, through the dark and driving rain, a grotesque blot on the landscape. He guessed they were at last two miles away, but the misshapen dome of amber that had partially encased the lake and its shore still leapt out of the indistinct and muddied carpet of civilization surrounding it. Thanks to Altivia, he knew the lake had been the very first place quarantined, the amber having only just been developed. It was perfectly understandable – this was the very thinnest of thin spots, the breech through which all the destruction had poured. Only Fringe Division knew (and now so did he) that the quarantine had been only_ mostly_ successful. Something about the place seemed to play hell with their equipment, and the fact that no sane human being would ever go near that new and terrible pile of jelly had led them to simply write the thing off. There had been no Fringe activity there since.

The bubble drew closer, and passed underneath them. Peter addressed the pilot.

"Land as close to that thing as you can, on the east shore." It was where he had told Broyles to wait, along with two ambulances and some armed agents. _She_ would be waiting, loading one side of the scales.

He saw the pilot turn to Walternate, who nodded, and they began to orbit and descend. The pilot found a patch of land next to the road that was devoid of trees, and set down. No sooner had the wheels touched the ground when the comm system shattered the quiet.

"Mr Secretary?"

"Major."

"The base has been evacuated, and we've put a one-mile cordon around the bay. We got Colonel Broyles the other guy out of the lab." Judging by the fact that he was even speaking at all, he had resisted the temptation to fiddle with the bomb. Good for him.

Peter hauled the chopper's port-side door open and hopped out, the silver case still locked to him. He walked to the co-pilot's door, and gestured for Walternate to wind it open. Over the chopper's hellish roar, he shouted

"Can you fly this thing?"

He knew Walternate was telling the truth when he answered "no" – he had done it with no forethought, the question having wrong-footed him. Satisfied, he reached inside, across Walternate, and shot the pilot's left shoulder with a dart. The man slumped in his seat almost instantaneously. He walked around the chopper's nose and opened the starboard rear door, standing aside to allow Olivia to get out. He heard Walternate's own door open and close, but paid it no regard – the man was no threat now.

"Peter!"

He would have been disappointed had the old goat not rolled the dice one last time. He bent to put his mouth next to Olivia's ear, and said

"Get as close to the amber as you can and wait for me."

His eyes landed on hers, briefly, and she nodded, turning and walking.

Peter spun to face Walternate, who was shouting over the rotor noise.

* * *

"I hope you've had fun today!"

In seeing his pilot drugged, Walternate realized that his last chance of at least breaking even in this thing had gone by the boards. There was no way to have support here before that bracelet of his went off – Peter was either dying here tonight or going home. In case of the latter, Walternate decided to send his enemies a message.

"Peter, if you insist on siding with that… _thief_, you should know that after today there will be no quarter given. You've hurt us, yes, but when we're ready to get back up… God help you. You can still come home, Peter. Ask yourself: are _they_ really worth your life?"

Peter frowned in unaffected puzzlement.

"What life? I'm a spark plug to you people." He half-turned to his left as if to rejoin the girl.

"Son, y-"

The words were chopped off – Peter's left fist had arced out, in a great looping haymaker, and smashed into his chin. He staggered backward a couple of steps before collapsing onto the wet earth, tasting hot copper in his mouth. He probed the area with his tongue, ignoring the lance of pain that shot up his jaw, checking for missing teeth. There were none.

Peter's face appeared, as if from nowhere, less than six inches in front of his own, as he squatted before him. Their eyes were almost level, despite the old man being propped up on his elbow. He could see the rain dripping off the end of Peter's nose, the rotors had turned his hair into a nest of writhing black snakes.

"If I ever hear you call me that again, I'll kill you."

It came with blood-curdling flatness – he meant every word. Despite his intention not to, he locked eyes with Peter, and the former vacuum-dark was gone. What had replaced it was _far_ worse: an infinite sea of bright, boiling lava, gouting and belching and leaping for as far as he could see. He imagined Peter's furious blue eyes sprouting equally blue blow-torch flames that would incinerate him where he lay. However, he merely rose and backed away.

"Stand up, and give me your coat."

Walternate stood, spitting a gob of blood, but made no move to obey the second order. The indignation at being hit made him petulant.

"Why do you want my _coat_?"

"Just give it to me, or I'll plug you in the cheek and take it." The gun came up menacingly.

Seeing no point in further bucking him, he slid out of his jacket and threw it to – at − Peter. He folded it over the metal case and turned, without speaking again, and walked away.

Filled with an inexplicable sense of foreboding, Walternate saw Peter draw up behind the girl, say something to her that he couldn't hear over the rotors above his head, and hold the jacket open as she put her back to him and fed her arms into the sleeves. She turned to face him and, after a portentous pause, buried her face in his shoulder, her arms wrapping around his middle and all but crushing the air out of him. Her hands were clawing at the back of his vest's fabric, and as Peter's face tilted down and landed in her hair, the reason for Walternate's sudden trepidation exploded behind his eyes in a horrifying epiphany. He felt his legs turn to water.

At any point since that cell door had opened, since Peter had set eyes on her, Walternate could have ended this. At _any point_.

Seein her now, trying desperately to drag him _into_ herself, he knew that Peter would never have put the girl in harm's way. Never. While he had been genuinely unconcerned _until_ then, everything that had followed − all that flatness, detachment, disinterest… all lies. He had been outplayed. Completely and utterly outplayed. Peter had waltzed in and taken a metaphorical bat to his prized emotion-detector, humiliated him, made him jump through hoops, and in roughly ten minutes his lair would be reduced to a smoking cinder, along with its secrets some of which Peter now held the sole copy. He felt a flash of hysterical, shrieking rage: after so many years of waging a one-sided war, he realized he was now looking at a true enemy − _the_ enemy − around which the other side would rally. Peter had declared himself no longer his son, so he felt no guilt in his savage wish that the armband would go up right now and take her with him. He spat more blood into the rain − well, he would only have to wait another ten minutes…


	7. One Last Hurdle

"OK – let's go home!"

He wanted to laugh and cry. She was gazing up with such childish expectation. Momentarily forgetting the promise he had made to himself, he allowed his eyes to roam her face. Her pupils were as big as thumb tack heads – she was so happy to see him, and he felt his stomach clench in disgust at himself. His own eyes were drawn down to her lips, landing there for a moment that seemed to last _days_, before he ripped them away. He had a bizarre urge to reach up and swipe the raindrops off her cheeks, and then remembered himself. _You can't – she doesn't know yet_. Her arms unwove from around his middle, and his left arm vacated the small of her back. This was going to be horrible – what he saw in her eyes was exactly what he _wanted_, but the opposite of what he _needed_: he needed _fear_. He took a pace backwards.

"Olivia, _you_ have to get us home. I couldn't risk using their technology."

"What? How am I supposed to do that? I can't control it!"

"Don't you remember?"

She didn't, and had a sinking feeling that Altivia was responsible, gobbling up her scattered memories and hoarding them away like a greedy child's toys.

In all his planning, this was the one hurdle he couldn't go around. Getting in was relatively easy, but he could see no way to get home that didn't call on her abilities. Using their crossover tech was out of the question: he didn't know how to work it (_she_ hadn't known). He could threaten all he wanted but, if he stepped onto that magical platform, he would be handing them back control. They could use it to send them _anywhere_ − the middle of the Pacific, the _bottom_ of the Pacific, to Mars, to Altair-fucking-_Four_, and there wasn't anything he could do about it. He knew that once the base was empty the Secretary would be free to do whatever he wanted. They were isolated at the lake, but it wouldn't last long.

He looked down at his bracelet – they had less than twelve minutes. Twelve minutes to take her from panting relief to outright terror. He remembered the bulge under his vest, and the final link in this chain closed with dismaying ease. He reached up to his bracelet and disconnected the C-4 from the biometric monitors − now it could only go off if and when the countdown ran out. This would be the biggest gamble of his life; next to this, the bomb was nothing. Even if she did get them home, he was releasing the devil in a bottle that was her double. Better that, though, than her being in the hands of the enemy…

"Peter, what are you doing?" It had been both a question and a warning.

"Olivia, it's all up to you now – this C-4 will go off at the end of the countdown." He pointed to it – it was enough to cut him in half. "They're coming._ Remember_."

He drew the tranquilizer and fired, dimly aware that he just vaporized the headquarters of the Department of Defence.

* * *

"_NOOO!"_

Even before it had happened she had started forward, but too slowly to stop it. There was a thumping whistle, and a red-plumed dart, as big as a fountain pen's action, appeared in Peter's left thigh. As he sank to the ground, she reached out, instinctively, and yanked it out, throwing it away. No good. He plopped into a seated position, his back against the amber dome, with his eyes opening and closing, as if he were trying to ward off sleep. Olivia, completely forgetting the explosives, clawed and pulled at the bracelet. It was now emitting an constant and ominous beep, like every hospital-show flat line she had ever heard – the wiggling green line was smoothing out. She pawed and twisted and tugged with all her might, but it wasn't going anywhere. Belatedly, she found a small, narrow slot cut into the cylinder that ran up and down the thing. A keyhole.

"Peter! _Peter_!"

She seized two handfuls of vest and shook him. He was about to go under.

"Where's the key? _Where's the key?_"

His mouth opened, and his eyes tried to focus. His words were slurred – it was costing him enormous effort to speak. She lowered her ear to his mouth.

"Sorry… left it… behind."

There was no more. His eyes closed, his head tilting back and resting against the dome.

* * *

Walternate, against his every desire, had stood under the helicopter's downwash, cold without his jacket, and watched the two of them very intently. He didn't know quite why, except that it was in his very nature to observe and record. When Peter drew his pistol and shot _himself_, however, Walternate suddenly knew he had been watching them for exactly this reason: an escape hatch.

He spun around and all but tore the co-pilot's door off its hinges. His hand was almost at the radio when he realized, belatedly, that what he was trying to radio was now on its way to the ionosphere: Peter was unconscious; the bomb had gone off. Somehow, this by-passed him completely, the red mist of fury obscuring it – with barely a pause, he retuned the chopper's radio and contacted the closest military installation, demanding backup and transportation. If the girl was still here, dead or alive, when they got here, he would ram her through a _sieve_, and analyze the resulting goo.

* * *

The ground fell away from her, the scenery fleeing in every direction at breakneck speed.

She had managed to bustle her alternate into a tiny room inside her mind, and had lock her behind a door of sorts, but the copious adrenaline screaming through her blood since being sprung meant it was now taking every ounce of conscious effort to keep her there. The door in her mind was rickety, its rotting wooden boards separated by tantalizing gaps through which Olivia could sense a lurid pinkish-red glow. It was the exact colour of a Christmas bauble, and for no reason she could understand this colour made her almost as uncomfortable as the personality she knew it represented. It seemed to be some abstract embodiment of the alienness, the _opposite_ of this place. While leaning into the door to keep it from opening, she could hear a revolting sound: a yammering buzz, like that of angry bees, which she knew to be her captive's attempts to tip control back into her favour. It was infuriating – an itch she just couldn't scratch. Since the Tank experiments began, she had been steadily parceling her enemy into a smaller and smaller box, but she couldn't seem to deliver the killer blow – it was like trying to stab an oily marble with an ice pick.

Seeing Peter again, for _real_ this time, had diverted her from her vigil over that door. Her alternate had sensed it, and was battering for attention.

_I'm not letting you out._

_**Oh, come on. There's no reason to stay here. He was lying! Let's go home – Frank will be there. Wouldn't you like to see him?**_

For a very brief moment, she thought she, _would_ like to see Frank…

_Frank's yours, not mine. Mine's right _here_. _

There was an ominous silence that was somehow worse than the taunting and cajoling. Her alternate knew Peter was the foundation on which she had built her so-far-impenetrable ramparts, and knew exactly what and how to attack. She went to work.

_**You're never getting out of here now. You can't do ANYTHING without him, can you? But for your stupid teenage fantasies I'd have beaten you a long time ago. **_

_Shut up._

The reddish glow intensified. Olivia realized that by merely engaging her alternate in this discourse, she was lending her power. However, there was absolutely nothing she seemed to be able to do about it − the sight of Peter sinking to the floor, unconscious, right when she needed him, had destroyed the scaffolding she had been standing on.

_**Ah, so **_**that's**_** it. I've been there for **_**months**_** – do you really think he'd resist for **_**that**** long**_**? All those months you've been imagining him – what did you think was going to happen when he got here? That he was going to sweep you up in his arms? He's changed – I'VE changed him.**_

_SHUT UP._

_**Think of it: months and months, and only **_**now**_** he turns up?**_

_Yes, but he's _here_. Why come back for me if not –_

_**You're an asset, Olivia, an asset with a unique skill. They wanted you back before their enemies could figure out how to make you dance.**_

_He's risking his life!_

_**Please – you think that bomb's real? Or those fancy doodads on your arms? I wouldn't be surprised if that "C-4" was Play-doh. He knows they can't kill him while they need him for the Weapon. He's **_**bluffing**_**!**_

While sure that none of this was true, she was simultaneously and equally sure that it was _all_ true. She remembered the look in Peter's eyes as he had told her he was putting his life in her hands, and the red glow began to nudge the door outwards, and her along with it.

_**OK, let's say the C-4's real. He's insane. Run − the Secretary's chopper is right there. The base was empty, you heard it – he can't hurt anybody but himself now…**_

_NO! I'm the only one who can get us home! Save him!_

The countdown dived into her eyes: **0:08:06**.

_**Do you really **_**want**_** to go home, though? This isn't the Peter you poured your heart out to last year, and you're not the Olivia who poured it out. Those people don't exist any more. He's had me, and he can't go back…**_

"SHUUUUUUT UUUUUUUUUUUP!"

This last was out loud, though she didn't know it − a stricken scream of terror and that drove her to her knees with her fists mashed into her temples. With one last heave, the mind-door exploded outwards in a hail of splinters and rent iron bands, throwing Olivia back, and her doppelganger's baleful un-light roared out. She could feel it swirling, seeking, penetrating with malevolent glee. Olivia had gone beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond worry for her own _life_: she was now afraid for her _soul_.

Her awareness collapsing piece by piece, she abandoned her efforts to stay conscious and met her enemy head-on. There was a bright white flash, like sheet lightning, and then she knew no more.

* * *

The darkness began to brighten, all at once, as if a rheostat were being wound up behind his eyes. He opened them, and let the surroundings move and shift. After a while, they coalesced into a dark face, surrounded by a highly contrasting whiteness. The face spoke.

"You stupid son of a bitch."

Even in his semi-consciousness, Peter heard the grudging respect hiding behind this, and opened his eyes all the way.

"Well, hello to you, too."

He tried to sit up, but upon getting half way his abdominal muscles mutinied, and he plopped back gracelessly. He was on some kind of elevated platform. It was soft. He felt strong hands seize his shoulder and elbow and help him into a sitting position. Broyles dipped into his front coat pocket and produced something small and metallic.

"Would you mind explaining this?"

The bracelet key. Instinctively, Peter's eyes darted to his right bicep – there was nothing there. He released the breath he hadn't known he was holding. Broyles' eyes were still demanding an answer. He marshaled his muddy consciousness.

"I had to scare her, Broyles. Badly. It was the only way to get us home. I left the key here to… remove temptation."

Broyles shook his head, dubious but satisfied. Peter swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and felt a wave of nausea.

"Woah!"

"I had them bring you around – I wasn't just going to sit there while you drooled and slurred till tomorrow morning." There was something like childish vengeance coating that, and Peter chuckled. "I can't help noticing you've only brought one case back." Peter looked down and to his right – the silver case was on the floor of what he now realized was an ambulance. The handcuff had been removed. Broyles had spare keys, of course; they were his handcuffs.

"What happened?" He tried to forestall talk of mass-destruction.

"It went exactly as you said it would – he disappeared, the two of you reappeared, about an hour ago."

"Is she alright?"

"Unconscious, but her vitals were right down the middle. She's in no danger as far as the EMTs could tell."

Peter nodded, as satisfied as he was going to be.

"Where's my bomb?"

Broyles hadn't wasted any time, but then he never did. Peter's answer was the very definition of prevarication.

"I left it behind."

Broyles' eyes closed in seething frustration.

"Did it go off?"

Again, a dainty dodge.

"I swear, on my father's life, it didn't kill anybody, Broyles." _It_ didn't kill anybody; not _I_ didn't kill anybody.

"_Did it go off?_"

"YES!"

After a very brief moment where Peter thought he was going to be slugged, Broyles seemed to calm himself.

"No collateral damage – you're _absolutely sure_…" His eyes were boring into Peter's searching for any sign of a lie.

"Everything within a mile had been evacuated at least fifteen minutes beforehand. I heard it myself."

Apparently this was something Broyles could take to his superiors, and the atmosphere in the ambulance thinned. Broyles stood and opened the back doors – the night air rushed in, cool and invigorating. It was also raining on this side, it seemed − the ambulance's rear lights painted red and white beams onto the swirling curtain of raindrops.

"Alright. We'll do a proper debrief later. They've taken her to Boston General; your father's already there, he says she'll be out for a few days, and then you can get started."

"No."

Had she been there before him, even if unconscious, he knew he would have been unable to resist. Luckily, or _un_luckily, she wasn't, and the shame and regret he had nurtured remained intact.

"What do you mean?" Broyles' expression would have been comical in _any_ other circumstance, but here it was close to heartbreaking. Peter spoke with forced evenness – his iceman reserves had been completely depleted.

"I'm not going back to Boston. I'm taking that case to Massive Dynamic so we can start cracking it open. The data will be encrypted, and now the shit's hit the fan over there we're on a clock: they know we've got it."

"Peter… there must be fifty hackers living on the same block as Massive Dynamic…"

"We gotta keep this in-house, Broyles. We've no idea what could be in that case. Maybe plans for super-advanced tech, and having stuff like that floating around in circulation…"

Broyles' nod signaled his understanding.

"So, what… you're gonna do this on your own?"

"Nah – I think I can persuade Nina to spare Brandon for a while. That reminds me, can I borrow your phone? I'd better call ahead so they can set up − we'll need the supercomputers isolating from the rest of the building's network."

"And the Internet," Broyles added, fishing his phone from his inside coat pocket. Peter took it with a "good point!" and a half-grin. As he was inputting Nina's cell number, Broyles spoke again, very quietly, almost as if he didn't want to be heard.

"She left you a message, before she disappeared. Do you wanna hear it?"

Peter looked up from the phone, met Broyles' eyes briefly, and then resumed dialing. Broyles did not relay the message, and read in Peter's glance that he would kill probably her if they ever met again. Peter held the phone to his ear.

"Nina Sharp."

"Nina, it's Peter…"

"Oh, thank _God_! Did you find her? Is she alright?"

"She's alive, but unconscious. They'd done… something to her, tried to rewrite her memories or something." _And when that didn't work they poked her full of holes…_

"Where are you now?"

"Still at the lake. Listen, can you put Brandon on?"

"Hold on…"

Brandon's eager voice made him smile.

"I'm here, Peter." He had probably been standing right next to Nina all night, pacing, waiting for news. His voice was slightly less focused – Nina had out him on speakerphone.

"Clear your schedule, buddy – I come bearing gifts."

"You got it? How much?"

"Forty terabytes, give or take. Oh, and a toy."

"Toy? What is it?"

"Ah ah – not so fast. You've got work to do before I get there. I need you to −"

"Yank all the supercomputer's LAN connections. Wait – you're coming _here_?"

Their common assumption was beginning to get on his nerves – he felt his "all business" front begin to slip, but restrained himself from snapping at the boy.

"Yes." He put his hand over the mouthpiece and addressed Broyles, quietly.

"Do you have something I can drive down there?"

Broyles pulled a single black-topped key from his coat pocket and tilted his head at the wall behind Peter; "something" was parked next to the ambulance. Peter took the key and his metal case and stood, stepping out of the ambulance's back doors. After telling Brandon to get started, and to expect him in an hour or two, he hung up, tossing Broyles' phone back to him. He pondered for a moment, getting wet again, and then spoke his mind.

"Broyles, it's gonna be quiet for a little while, while they get back in their feet, but then he's gonna come down on us – on _me_ − like a ton of bricks. He's had them believing they're at war, but until now it's only been revenge. _His_ revenge. I can't begin to tell you how dangerous he is now that this _is_ a war. He's _poison_. We have to move. _Fast_."

It occurred to Broyles right then that Peter was telling this to the wrong guy – whether he liked it or not, Peter was in charge of this thing now. He had a unique insight into their enemy's leader, and now a treasure chest full of his secrets. Broyles could only hope that this thing wouldn't become as personal to Peter as it obviously had to Walternate. He was not optimistic in this regard…

Peter had one hand on the ambulance door, about to close it, when something occurred to him.

"Can you do me a favour? Tell Walter _not_ to call me before noon tomorrow, if he expects me to talk to him, that is. There's a letter in the top drawer of my desk – he is _not_ to read it."

He had been afraid Broyles would press him as to why – _I need space_ – but he did not, merely nodding. Peter was silently grateful.

"I'll see you at the debrief."

He slammed the door closed, and after a moment the ambulance left, slowly, and with no sirens – it was now merely Broyles' taxi.

* * *

He walked to his borrowed ride, now alone with his thoughts. After tottering slightly on one step, he looked around for a reasonably clean puddle and bent down to splash the water on his face. The chill ran down his spine and imbued him with more awareness. Pausing to remove his still-sopping vest, he opened the passenger door and spread it out on the seat back; he would aim the heaters at it on the way to Massive Dynamic and sort out a change of clothes when he got there. The metal case joined it on the seat. He circled around and opened the driver's door, climbing in and putting the key in the ignition. The wipers came on, sounding eerily like a heartbeat. The door closed.

It hit him. All of it. All at once. The emotions he had managed to stuff into his mental suitcase had been bulging and groaning for release for hours – _days_ – and the case exploded in a shower of fear and rage and shame and guilt and loss. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and wept.


	8. Epilogue: The Calm

Every time he closed his eyes, the taunting slew of whickering alphanumerics remained, hovering. They had seen almost nothing but screens and screens of this ostensible gibberish since Peter had rolled up that morning; a brief hug from Nina, an even briefer but equally heartfelt handshake from Brandon, and the two of them had retreated into the ivory tower of the server room and gone to work. Peter had seen Brandon's expression evolve, in microcosm, from something close to arousal at the opening of the case, and the exposure of those siren hard drives, through cautious optimism, cautious _pessimism_, to its current setting of "oh hell, what have we gotten ourselves into?".

The encryption was unlike anything either of them had ever seen before − it seemed to have been _designed_ to frustrate. One block would unravel, giving them hope, but then another two would coil up even further. It was maddening – they were trying to fit a carpet perfectly flush to the haphazard topography of a cave floor. Even with Massive Dynamic's beyond state-of-the-art equipment, they both knew this nut would require human ingenuity to crack. Thus, they had foregone sleep – Brandon until an hour ago, he was now napping in the corner on a couch purloined from the cafeteria – and set about attacking Walternate's Gordian Knot with everything they could bring to bear. Some progress _had_ been made: from the medium-security directory, a name had floated up out of the foaming chaos. Upon consulting the web from a terminal upstairs, Peter had almost dropped the phone in his haste to call Broyles, who had expressed displeasure at being woken and had immediately forgotten it upon hearing the name Vincent Drake – Drake was a Deputy Director of the FBI, a man who was privy to almost everything Broyles had ever reported.

Since that early rally there had been very little, but neither man's attention had wandered. They had appropriated a coffee maker from a nearby staff lounge, so they had an unlimited supply of caffeine. Gradually, however, it dawned on them that they would eventually have to concede eight hours to oblivion somewhere down the line. The certain knowledge that their opponents were, at that very moment, furiously shuffling their pieces to seal this new this hole in their defence made no difference. Brandon had pointed out that their most important nexus, the junk shop, was now a smoldering pile of rubble, and had ridden that fact into a blissful-looking nap, leaving Peter straining to stay awake. It was the middle of the day, but no natural light reached the server room, and they had kept it dark to ease their eyes. Since his return he had been surfing a toppling wave of delayed adrenaline, but that wave was now breaking, and the backwash was revealing a bone-deep exhaustion.

Without Brandon's helpful distraction, his mind had begun to drift and meander, but always coming back to the same clutch of thoughts – _is she awake? has she read it?_ Like a moth trying to alight on a candle flame, he came back and back to her stricken expression as he had slipped away. He had put the fear of God into her, and while it had gotten them home, it had also apparently unchained her double's repressed essence. He imagined the two of them fighting it out, willing the right one to win. The more he questioned his course of action, the more he came to know it was the right one, no matter how much it hurt right now. Had he glossed over his actions and _not _told her, there would have been happiness, but a tenuous, sword-of-Damocles happiness that would have eaten away at him until he finally broke, and then it would be too late to recover.

* * *

A deafening electronic chirrup slapped him awake – his head had sunk to the table, his arms out in front of him. The phone blared again – it was a reroute from the switchboard. Peter spun around in his seat to look at the clock. 12.01. He half-grinned, and answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"Peter – stop this nonsense and come home right now." Right for the jugular.

"Hello Walter."

"If you hurry you can get here before she wakes up!"

"Clearly she hasn't yet or you would have put her on. Wouldn't you." Not a question, but he answered anyway, shamelessly.

"_Yes!_ You know how this works by now, Peter – she needs familiar surroundings if this is going to work."

"… and she's at the old lab. Bringing her there was the right call, Walter – she's never seen our setup here."

He was wiggling like a worm on a hook. Walter lowered his voice.

"Peter… she'll forgive you."

"You can't know that. I haven't even forgiven _myself_. I don't know if I ever _will_."

"She fooled _all_ of us…"

This, for no reason he could understand, made him angry.

"Yes, but "all of us" didn't _sleep_ with her, did you!"

"Oh for heaven's sake!" Back to hectoring. "She went there to get you because she loves you, and you came _back_ because you love _her_ – I don't see the problem!" Of course he didn't. "And all this letter business… it's so…"

"What? _Cowardly_?"

"Frankly, yes!"

"Like the letter you told me you wrote me?"

He regretted it as soon as he said it; his head fell into his free hand. He knew now, at last, how Walter had felt while carrying his own devastating secret − the feeling of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Only Walter had spent twenty-five _years_ adrift in that sea, being eaten at every day by that corrosive pain, but unable to bring himself to tell his son the truth for the certainty that he would never, ever be forgiven. His anger evaporated completely

"Walter, I'm sorry. I forgot."

There was a brief, considering silence.

"No, I should have realized: you're in my shoes now. She means a lot to you, and you don't want to lose her. Sounds familiar..."

Walter's voice had pitched up in ironic humour, and Peter felt himself smile ruefully in reply. He decided to try talking shop.

"Have you figured out what you're gonna do?"

"Ah! Yes, actually, I have! Agent Farnsworth, God bless her – she reminded me of that young girl who was taken over by the dead sailor..."

Lisa Donovan. Of course. An awful lot was the same – two personalities fighting for control over one body. He also remembered the course of treatment.

"So basically it's drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Why am I not surprised…"

He heard Brandon stir behind him.

"Peter, the first thing she'll do when she wakes up is ask for you. What do I tell her?"

"Just give her the letter. Just that." At least a hundred of her different reactions at reading it had riffled through his mind between his writing it and now. In it he had spilled everything. _Everything_. It had taken up four pages, but he had closed with the thing that mattered most.

"I'll do that. In the meantime, can _I_ come see you?"

The childish hope made Peter laugh, actually _laugh_.

"Walter, I haven't run away! Not this time, anyway. I just needed some space, that's all. Besides, it's your company – you can do whatever you want."

"Thank you." Relief. Another voice sounded off in the background. A female voice. Peter's heart froze − n_ot yet, surely_…"What's that, dear?" A pause. The voice repeated itself. "Agent Farnsworth wants to know if you're coming home for Christmas."

The tension popped, like a soap bubble, and Peter all but bellowed in unmitigated mirth, causing Brandon to shoot off the couch like a flipped-up rake. His laugh subsided, and he replied

"We'll see."

"Alright, we'd better get back to work."

"Yeah, so had _we_. Bye, dad. I'll see you soon."

There was a profound silence from both ends of the line. Peter recalled the hideous, insectile creature that had technically sired him, and the savage glee he had felt as his fist had crashed into his jaw. His father was, and always had been, here.

"Goodbye, son."

Peter replaced the phone in its cradle, still weary, but somehow cheered. Brandon wandered over, gouging sleep from the corners of his eyes. Through a tendon-straining yawn, he managed to say

"Shall I take over for a while? You look like you've been up since 1990."

"Well it _feels_ like I've been up since 1985." 1985 had, indeed, been an interesting year, and after a fashion he _had_ been "up" since then. Brandon cut through his reverie.

"Take five – I'll hold the fort. If any plans for a dark matter bomb come through I'll sound off." He sounded almost _wistful_…

"Nothing less." He raised his finger for emphasis, before reclining on the couch. Within a minute, a dreamless sleep had taken him.

* * *

Brandon knocked softly, cautiously. The Secretary's mood was more than volatile at the moment: he was a revolver with five chambers loaded. This was not a report he wanted to deliver himself. They were meeting at the Secretary's house, their former headquarters now a hole in the ground, and he could conceivably "kill the messenger" here with no reprisal. In an unfortunate coincidence, it had started to rain while he was walking up the driveway – rain that had come from nowhere; the midday sky had darkled to an inky blue-grey. He hoped it was not a portent.

He had been spared direct contact with the Secretary until now, having been submerged in damage assessment and rebuild projections, but he had heard second-hand that the normally-reserved man had been almost maniacal. Brandon felt as if he had been coated head to toe in a cold syrup of dread.

The door opened after a long moment and revealed the Secretary, looking harried and sleep-deprived, in his robe. His hair was slightly wild, his eyes squinting and red around the edges. He probably hadn't seen unimpeded daylight for forty-eight hours. Oh dear…

"Ah, Brandon. Come in."

He had been in this house before, for official functions, but a work meeting here seemed extremely strange, especially with Mrs Bishop taking his coat offering him tea. He declined, regretfully − Mrs Bishop made excellent tea, but the forthcoming exchange would very likely end with him running from this house for his life. He followed the Secretary into his office, leaving his wife watching the still-current coverage of the Liberty Island explosion on TV. Theories abounded, but the truth would obviously never come out. The party line was laughably contrived: an accident with an experimental nuclear power source. However, there had been no other way to shoehorn the word "nuclear" into the cover story, and even the most dim-witted conspiracy theorist could take a large explosion and an EMP and put two and two together. Better to tell a half-truth than a lie, and remove all notion of terrorism; the Statue of Liberty was − had been − a very meaningful target.

The fact that only three people had been killed "in the explosion" had been hailed as a miracle. Brandon, knowing better, remembered Peter Bishop's terrifying mannequin-face as he had shot those men. He had regained consciousness next to Colonel Broyles while lying on a lawn, some lawn, over the bay from the… where the facility _used_ to be, and had all but drowned in his relief − if it had served Peter's purpose, he would have killed him. Along with the relief had come grudging admiration: the bomb's yield had obviously been meticulously calculated to do only as much damage as necessary. Pieces of the Statue had actually survived (but were so radioactive they would only ever be viewed through very thick glass). It had been almost _surgical_.

* * *

The mahogany desk was strewn with so many tablet computers that no trace of the timber was visible, and the sight caused Brandon's stomach to drop even further: the Secretary _hated_ paperwork. What had happened two days ago had been nothing short of a catastrophe, but the very first problem that had to be dealt with was, much to the Secretary's fury, _publicity_. Always loath to address the proletariat himself, he had nominated Colonel Broyles to do it on his behalf, thereby restricting himself to dealing with other politicians, but even this had angered him. He would rather have been on the factory floor, Brandon knew, which was why he had been called here for an update. This would likely be the Secretary's first "real" work since the explosion.

"Sit down," he said gently, gesturing to a tan leather couch. Brandon sat, on the end closest to the door. The Secretary took the opposite couch, putting a paperwork-free coffee table between them. He lifted a red apple from the glass fruit bowl, bit into it with relish, and half-turned to his left, gazing out at the now-heavier rainfall. Apparently he found its sound soothing, and a soothed Secretary could only be a good thing. Brandon did not break the silence; no sane person would have done so. This was going far too well for his liking.

"So," he managed to say around his mouthful of fruit, turning to face his young visitor, "let's have it."

He didn't seem to be on that terrifying hair-trigger any more − his infuriating back-and-forth with the government might have blunted his rage. Brandon relaxed, _very_ slightly.

"I just got back from the off-site server. It looks like we'll be able to recover seventy to eighty percent of our original files when the time comes."

He had started with good news, but the Secretary bypassed it completely, seeing it for the prevarication it was.

"How long?" Another bite of the apple. Brandon imagined it was his own heart in the boss's hand. He took a steadying breath.

"Six months. Maybe five."

He had half-expected to have the fruit bowl flung at his head, followed by a howl of inarticulate fury, but the Secretary merely nodded, and chewed. Their former headquarters had been a double-edged sword: it had been stuffed to the gunwales with the most advanced technology on Earth – on _either _Earth, they had known − but that same technology was extremely difficult and expensive to replace, as they were now discovering. But the Secretary was tight with everybody who mattered. Money meant next to nothing.

"How much of it did Peter get, then?"

If anything, this could be the worst news of all, and Brandon's respite might end very abruptly here and now. He took another steadying breath.

"Everything in Black, everything in Grey, and about half of White."

Black was their most highly-classified data; White, their least. Peter had known exactly what he was doing: stealing a magician's notes on his most guarded tricks. Moreover, he had then destroyed those notes, intended that the magician would never be able to perform again. The Secretary surprised Brandon again by not murdering him where he sat; he merely ruminated on his apple. The rain battered the bay window ominously, the wind throwing great fistfuls of it every few seconds. Brandon fidgeted in his seat, wondering if the Secretary was strong enough to throw him through it. Again, though, the response was measured. Astute.

"That was only to spite us. He knew our Dunham would be carrying intelligence on their side; he wanted to break even."

Brandon was relieved, but tried mitigation anyway. In his occupation it was automatic, despite his knowledge that the Secretary detested it.

"All the data was encrypted. It'll be a while before they can read it…"

"But they'll cut through it eventually; my s… Peter is extremely capable." He paused, considering. "Have all our people over there contacted and told to abandon their posts − they'll have to be replaced. My typewriter doesn't seem to work any more, so you'll have to use the synchro-wave generator, even though it takes a good deal longer to get anything over. I doubt they'll crack the codes before all our people get out, but their Brandon might be as good as mine…"

Brandon had no reply. They had gone right past the bad news and were onto damage control already. His confusion didn't go unnoticed.

"You were expecting me to be angry."

Incredibly, something resembling a smile had crept onto the Secretary's face. Brandon felt himself grin in response.

"Frankly, yes." He restrained himself from adding that "anger" was far too mild a word for what he had been expecting.

"What with our entire operation gutted and crippled for half a year, our most dangerous secrets in the hands of the enemy, and our one bargaining chip lost?"

"Pretty much." Brandon then realized the Secretary had seen some sort of silver lining here, and found himself intrigued at what it could be. But not intrigued enough to ask. Happily, the Secretary told him anyway.

"Peter's plan had very little subtlety, and no foresight. He was trading solely on his state of mind…"

His expression was one of carefully masked petulance, and Brandon knew that this had been his first taste of being on the wrong end of a kamikaze mission. One that had utterly, completely wrong footed him. Made him look impotent, ineffectual. _Foolish_, even. He had seen his almost God-like authority totally subverted, and this, more than any material damage, Brandon knew, was what was bothering him. This all sounded very much like sour grapes. Then again, who knew what had happened between his being knocked out and them leaving…

"… but I'm quite sure we'll never see that Peter again".

"What makes you say that?" He knew his boss was one of the great readers of men.

"You've heard the phrase "the most dangerous opponent is the man with nothing to lose"?"

Brandon nodded, remembering Peter's casual execution of those guards and his physics-lecture tone when describing what would have happened if Brandon disobeyed him. He shuddered internally, further recalling the abject terror he had felt when his thigh had been pierced by that dart.

"In taking his Olivia home with him, he gave them each something to lose."

Brandon was quietly astonished. His entire infrastructure in ruins, his most precious documents copied, stolen, and the originals shredded, and the Secretary had looked ahead right to the end of the game. The rain's clattering seemed to amplify the following silence. Again, Brandon did not break it.

* * *

The Secretary had finished his apple.

"Do you want me to supervise the rebuild?" Brandon ventured. He didn't particularly want to, and didn't expect to be asked to, but he knew he was expected to offer.

"No – anybody could do that. I have something else for you." He wiped his hands on his robe, which was, handily, also red. To a child, he would have looked like an evil sorcerer.

Brandon thought he knew what was coming next − the Secretary's colossal long-game demanded it: they had to do something about Peter's apparent immunity to their threats. He was not disappointed.

"I need you and your teams to start working on alternatives to the Weapon. I want this finished."

"We've tried reconfiguring the parts we have to work with a different genetic code, or, better yet, no code at all, but we couldn't find any way to do it. They don't seem to have been programmed, as such. They have no moving parts. Somehow, symbiosis with your son has been built right into solid metal."

He noticed the Secretary's face harden at the word "son". He moved on swiftly.

"The only option we have is to try to use the damage _they've _already done. Reflect it back on them, somehow."

The Secretary's face slackened, seemingly in pleasure: the idea of inflicting that same drawn out, cancerous decay on _them_ was apparently very appealing. He nodded thoughtfully.

"Get started tomorrow – I'll find somewhere in the Pentagon for you to work where you won't be disturbed. Was the Weapon damaged in the explosion?"

Brandon was overjoyed at being able to offer some _good_ news.

"No – it was deep enough not to be harmed, and the EMP had no effect we could see. I can't help wondering what would have happened…"

"If Peter had known it was down there? We were lucky. The only reason _he_ didn't know is that our Agent _Dunham_ didn't know. If s_he_'d known, he would have brought something that would have put us on the Moon."

"Has she been debriefed yet?" Brandon sensed that he was now safe from the Secretary's wrath, but wanted to move off the subject of cataclysmic destruction.

"No, not yet. There's a potential gold mine buried in her subconscious, but all I've had in both ears for two days is people bleating about that bloody _Statue_! As you know, she could only tell us that their Dunham had been exposed to some drug that had activated her abilities, but she was never able to send us the molecular formula – that foolish old man would forget his head if it wasn't screwed on. Obviously, we now have nothing from which to take a sample."

Indeed – all of the other Dunham's blood samples had been in storage at the base…

"I'd also intended her to bring some or all of the Weapon's missing pieces back with her, but she was discovered before they could find more than two. If they have any sense at all they'll destroy them, but they don't, and they won't. They're too curious. They're keeping something that can literally make peoples' heads explode in that rickety Harvard laboratory of theirs, after all. I'd like you to set up a memory probe for her as soon as you're able." Brandon nodded.

The Secretary rose, which Brandon took to be his cue to leave, but he was again surprised.

"Would you stay and eat with us? Elizabeth's been driven to distraction with my moping these past two days and she'll be glad of the company."

Brandon, having just been relieved of his reconstruction duties, had nothing else to do, and accepted. He even managed to convince himself that he had been free to _decline_. But first he had to be sure of something.

"Sir… does your wife know?" Whispered, despite the closed office door, and the rain's roar.

"That Peter did this? No."

Brandon, reading between the lines, nodded his acquiescence.

"Now, if you'll excuse me," he said briskly, "I'll go put some clothes on. Dining in my robe… I couldn't imagine."

Brandon laughed, and not entirely obsequiously – the idea of Walter Bishop sitting down to eat in a dressing gown was truly ridiculous. He followed the Secretary back into the living room, where the latter branched off to go upstairs. He took his coat and put it back on.

"Oh Brandon, surely you're staying for dinner," Mrs Bishop's musical voice pleaded as she rose from her chair. Her expression was beseeching.

"Oh yes… I forgot!" he replied, with his first smile of the day. As Mrs Bishop rushed forward to take his coat again, he reflected that he had come here under a metaphorical raincloud, been followed by a _real_ one, and had expected to leave this house with his head on upside down. The fact that the Secretary himself had made him see that all was not lost had filled him with a vital glow. They were still in this fight.

He took his tie off, rolled his sleeves up, and went to help Mrs Bishop set the table.


End file.
